Music has been shown to have some interesting effects on the brain, affecting plasticity and revitalizing atrophied portions of the cortex. I am interested in neuroscience and would love to spin my musicianship in some way as to relate it to medicine. Do you know anything about that relationship, Lya? I would like your input 🙂
That's a practical connection, but that works as well.
Rehearsals encourage you to collaborate with even strangers for a common goal, concerts value contributions from each musician as a equal part, and social relationships emerge as a result. As you rehearse and perform concerts for many years, such relationships strengthen; this sense of social belonging can also help stabilize disadvantaged children with family and academic issues, and I have seen this transformation first-hand as a music teacher. And I am not the only one. Gustavo Dudamel did a similar thing as well. It's related to medicine if the purpose of medicine is about improving someone else's life.
Music also emphasizes in building up your sensitivity and compassion. Other people will see musical notes as just a set of abstract sound, but you see them as phrases with meaning, purpose, and motive creating emotional appeals or even stories. With sensitivity, you can penetrate and see something beyond. With compassion, you study composers' backgrounds when a certain piece was written, understand how their contexts affect the certain aspects of the pieces, and interpret in your own way what the composer was meant to say. These two factors are related to medicine when you are able to see beyond what is on the medical chart and truly understand what the patients are going through. This understanding, I hope, will lead to a better course of clinical treatments. It also prevents any judging or confirming your stereotypes whenever you meet, for example, obese patients. It helps you stay unbiased as much as you can when you treat patients, as though you are trying to learn a new piece of music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arVPNAigK74 Watch this from 12:40. And think about how you can do the same thing with all the pieces you play, not just Chopin. That's incredible, considering the level of compassion and sensitivity it takes to do so. I think it sums up nicely what I am trying to say.
