Musical Path: Brain to Strings to Universe
Hello, my name is Ilisa. I am a guitar teacher and stroke survivor. I travel a musical path. Consequently, this website is dedicated to all developing, recovering, and aging brains and their musical owners. (I’m convinced that everybody is musical). My goal is to create a one-stop-shop for all the articles, videos and studies I can find on the effects of music on the brain. I hope it will eventually be interesting and useful to students, researchers, and the casual reader.
What, exactly, is a musical path?
In my experience, it is a path to health. Through music practice, we form connections with other people and become aware of the workings of our own brains. My path has been via the meditative approach to guitar playing, described here and here. This mindset helped me recover from a pontine (brain stem) stroke and return to guitar practice. It didn’t occur to me until months after I had left the rehab hospital that I might never have played guitar again. I believe that I didn’t have that thought during initial recovery due to my habit of focusing on the next step and only that. The experience intensified my interest in playing a musical instrument and it’s effects on the brain. Subsequently, I decided to learn something new and put up a website.
This website presents the musical path as a curated collection of links to articles, videos, and primary research on the effects of playing music on the brain. I’ve organized the material into the following categories:
- Musical Brain – neuroscience of music and the developing, recovering, or aging brain
- Stress Management – the meditative approach to practice (specifically guitar) for stress reduction
- Musical Universe – investigations of music in the natural world, other species, included to both reflect the universality of music and just for fun.
The experts say the universe is composed of vibrations and frequencies. Therefore, it makes sense to me that the vibrations on a musical instrument must form some kind of connection between life on earth and the rest of the universe. It’s a way to recharge, refresh and revivify. No wonder it feels so good to play a musical instrument! To life!
