The following are articles that I saved regarding music as it relates to neurology and physiology. The findings of Dr. Wilson are extremely interesting and remind me of the fact that piano lessons for the children is a custom brought here by European immigrants which has now been lost. In Europe it was simply something all well brought up children, rich or poor, did.

From "The Doctor's Notebook" by Joseph C. Elia, MD, 6/18/83 Union Leader:

Gaetano Zappalo MD reported in the NYJ of Medicine that his studies show Mozart relieves rheumatic pain, Bach soothes indigestion, Schubert puts insomniacs to sleep, and Handel eases the pain of "broken hearts" and other emotional problems. Dr. Paul Hamilton reported at the Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Denver, CO that he has been using music because it has a "spiritual influence and healing effect on many people." Dr. Sterling Williams reported at the U of KA Med. Ctr. that music makes childbirth easier and reduced the degree of needed anesthesia. Dr. Helen Bonny, Director of Music Therapy at Catholic U., D.C. notes that "music entering the mind makes one experience a deep state of relaxation. It raises one's emotional feelings and relaxes the muscles. It could get one out of the deepest depression."

A famous neurologist, Professor Frank R. Wilson of UC at SF has reported findings on "Mind, Muscle and Music" that is published by the Selmer Musical Instrument Company. He notes, "despite the stereotyped and uncomplimentary notions you might find in the locker room or the recital hall, there is really very little to distinguish the musician from the serious athlete, except that the musician concentrates on the muscles of the hand and face and uses his ear, not his eye, to monitor what he is doing. Both depend on hours of drill and exercise to train their muscles in complicated patterns. He notes too, that "a Maserati is just a toy compared to the hand. You can leaf through the owner's manual for the car and find out what it will do, but the hand is infinitely trainabale and programmable." Ninety percent of the cerebellum regulates either the hands or arms.

The practicing musician is "engaged in an incessant teaching process for the cerebellum" whose job is to make muscular activity automatic when the task is one we'll be doing over and over again. This is why "musicians, the small muscle athletes, can look forwrd to continuation of their skills at a time when a tennis player has long since returned to the sidelines." Dr. Wilson notes that Apollo, the Greek god of light was also the god of music and healing, and his son, Asclepius was the god of medicine.

"Music therapy has continued to be employed in medicine up to the present time, specifically in the treatment of stroke victims, psychiatric patients and children with learning disorders or retardation. Not only is [playing a musical instrument] fun, but it helps with muscular development, physical coordination, and the ability to hold up under stress, memory skills, vocal, visual, and aural development."

In an article about Dr. Wilson by Patricia McCormack, she quotes him as saying that when the music student starts out with hopes fixed on immediately sounding like a professional, that attitude will be defeating -- the same as a similar attitude brings down a fledgling sports star. Music, like sports, takes lots of practice and patience, while delivering evidence in small steps that improvement is taking place. Wilson's studies show that everyone has the physical and mental ability to play a musical instrument. His studies led Wilson to become a consultant to the American Music Conference, an organization that promotes music and is funded by makers of musical instruments and also to his taking piano lessons for the first time at age 40. He says that after three months of sweating over the keyboard his "hands suddenly were making the music that I had been hearing in my head since the beginning."

It was his daughter's piano lessons that originally started him on the neurological trail of music. He noticed a physical and mental evolution taking place in her as she progressed which he could not account for. He felt that as a neurologist he should know more about the processes involved in the development of skilled use of the hands. Research led him to conclude the brain is designed to contribute to musicianship.

Wilson found it takes more of the brain to control the small muscles of the body than the large muscles. The small muscles are used by musicians -- fingering strings and tiny keys, pushing valves, racing over piano keys. In addition, he said a major subdivision of the motor control system -- the cerebellum -- in humans largely regulates types of movements used by musicians in playing instruments. About 90% of the cerebellum functions almost exclusively to improve control of the precise movements of the hands and arms.

Wilson said his investigations point to a correlation between music study and muscular development, physical coordination, a sense of timing, mental concentration, the ability to hold up under stress, memory skills and vocal, visual and aural development. He said goals and methods used in music instruction can bring about a balanced, progressively refined development of the brain and neuromuscular system. For success in music, Wilson said, students must learn to tell when they are improving, no matter how small the improvement. If musicians are compelled by the knowledge that they are reaching new limits and sharing the experience with others, as in group playing, then they are more likely to succeed.

Portions of What Happens When Music Meets the Brain by David Stipp, Wall Street Journal, ???

Music is a window on the brain, scientists say. Few human activities exercise as many brain functions: Playing music demands motor skill, and listening to it stimulates both feelings and intellectual faculties. Scientists now use music to study sense perception, emotions, coordination, timing, and the functions of each of the brain's hemispheres.

Strokes and other brain disorders reveal much about brain functions, including music and language. In one recently reported case, a stroke knocked out only its victim's ability to name fruits and vegetables, suggesting that categories of words are organized in the same area of the brain. Similarly, strokes have shown that key musical abilities are organized in the right half of the brain, which is associated with emotions and the integration of complex details into wholes.

Tedd Judd, a psychologist at the Pacific Medical Center in Seattle, tells of a composer who suffered a stroke on the right side of the brain and could still compose melodies. But he lost the ability to compose counterpoint, in which melodies are integrated according to complex rules.

Strokes on the right side sometimes erase the ability to sing, even though the memory of song lyrics may be intact. People afflicted that way may speak in a monotone because they can no longer put melody into their voices, says Elliott Ross, a neurologist at the U of Texas medical school. But scientists now also realize that music isn't totally a right-brain function. At the U of CA at LA, researcher John Mazziotta found that in most people listening to simple melodies, the right side of the brain was activated; but those who visualized what they heard as notes on a page mainly used the left side.

Music, long considered the language of emotions, is also an ideal stimulus for experiments on feelings. Studies show that different kinds of music from Bach to jazz affect heart rates and other emotional indicators at different levels of pleasantness and intensity.

Brain researchers have been trying for years to understand how the brain handles sensory input, and music is important to their study of sound perception. Scientists believe that some elements of music--like common pitch intervals--have been shaped to reflect the structure of the human auditory system. Most people, even in different cultures, perceive tones separated by an octave as closely related. This may result from the channeling of nerve impulses caused by such tones to the same nerve cell in the brain.

Tempo is another musical element that intrigues brain researchers. Most people can't both walk and chew gum at different tempos because the brain can apparently monitor only one internal metronome at a time, says George Moore at USC. Using sensors, including small needles inserted into musicians' hands, Moore has also found that performers use unconscious tricks to improve their sound. When playing trills on a violin, some players lighten finger pressure. Then, to compensate for the pitch distortion the lighter pressure would cause, they adjust their hand positions. "Musicians don't even know they do these things," he says, which suggests that they subliminally refer to detailed brain "maps" of their instruments to create the desired sound.

Internal maps may guide listeners as well as players, which could explain the difficulty many people have learning to like unfamiliar music. There may even be music so alien that our brains aren't equipped to make sense of it. "Some avant-garde composers who base their music on new arbitrary systems are interesting, but their music may never take hold with listeners because it doesn't mesh effectively with the deep cognitive structures of the mind," says Roger Shepard, a Stanford U psychology professor.