Prof. Dr. med. Rosch / Prof. Dr. med. Koeditz • Music & Brain – Medical Perspective
Music and states of consciousness
The ear is also intensely connected with those brain systems, which regulate our states of consciousness. Investigations with MRT-Music® of the classical composer and musicologist Peter Hübner have shown, that the most common sleep problem, insomnia, can be widely solved with the help of music of natural harmonic structure.
An impressive example of how intensively medical music influences the brain systems for consciousness is described in the following report which pharmacist Ingrid Singer gives in a collection of reports about the Medical Resonance Therapy Music®:®
Thirty years old, Mrs A first developed depression due to difficult family situations. She was treated with tranquillisers. These calmed her down in the beginning, but because of the unchanged inability to cope with her family pressures, her condition got increasingly worse. For many years, Mrs A followed the advise of her doctors to suppress her depression with different drugs of increasing dosage, but with poor success. The depression got worse and in addition more and more tension and painful abdominal problems were reported. Mrs A. received a strong drug for endogene depression. In the following 5 years she developed an immense urge to sleep. Her waking times were reduced to a few hours and her social and family life came to a stop. The change of medication to neuroleptica and an inpatient treatment at a university hospital for many month provided only little help. Soon Mrs A. was only awake for one hour per day.
At her 60th birthday Mrs A’s daughter got her a cd-player and several music preparations of MRT-Music® as a birthday present. Although in the beginning no results became obvious, the mother was treated with the music regularly. After 3 months of treatment first results were that Mrs A. slept less. She started to take part in family life again, to show interest in different things and to undertake activities on her own – something which had not been the case for nearly 20 years.
18 months after the start of the treatment with the music preparations her sleep was normal, tension and pain in the abdomen were gone. She rode alone by bus to the next city to visit her daughter, overlooked the homework of her grandchildren of her son and started activities with her old friends.
Thanks to the Medical Resonance Therapy Music®, Mrs A. had returned to normal and rediscovered her joy for life.
For an understanding of these results the research findings of Prof. Dr. Hildebrandt of the Institute for Rehabilitation Research at the University of Marburg in Germany are of help. In his work “Chronobiological Aspects of Music Physiology“ (23) he shows, how the organism is widely ruled by harmonic organisation principles, during regeneration and, particularly during sleep. Due to this musical order of many important physiological processes Prof. Hildebrandt calls the human body a music physiology.
Since MRT-Music® depicts these harmonic patterns musically, they come via the ear to the brain and are represented there and via the way of resonance, stimulate the natural regeneration processes, which were in disorder in Mrs A. A consequence of a regular stimulation, step by step, the natural proportions between the states of consciousness come back. In this way the intensive positive effects of MRT-Music® on sleep disorders of the most diverse kinds can be explained.
The case of Mrs A. and many others, make clear that music is not only experienced in the waking state but that the acoustic patterns also influence the activity of the brain during sleep. As soon as the air pressure changes have reached, via the mechanical signal paths, the cochlea, they are transformed into bioelectrochemical impulses and start their journey into the complex world of the brain – independent of whether we are asleep, awake or dreaming.
Therefore it is not astonishing that music of natural harmonic structure has such a great success in the normalisation of states of consciousness because the cognitive and emotional brain systems – as expression of our consciousness – and the brain systems which regulate the regeneration during sleep, are simultaneously stimulated by it.
