it 's a distinctprivilege to be here a few weeks ago i saw a video on youtube of congresswoman gabrielle giffords
at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets this one entered her left hemisphere and knocked out her broca 's area the speech center of her brain and in this session
gabby 's working with a speech therapist and she 's struggling to produce some of the most basic words and you can see her growing more and more devastated until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears and she starts sobbing
wordlessly into the arms of her therapist
and after a few moments her therapist tries a new tack and they start singing together and gabby starts to sing through her tears and you
can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels and she sings in one descending scale she sings
let it shine let it shine let it shine
and it 's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail in this case literally speak
seeing this video of gabby giffords reminded me of the work of dr gottfried schlaug one of the preeminent neuroscientists studying music and the brain at harvard and schlaug is a proponent of a therapy called melodic intonation therapy which has become very popular in music therapy now
whether it was happy birthday to you or their favorite song by the eagles or the rolling stones and after seventy hours of intensive singing lessons he found that the music was able to literally rewire the brains of his patients and create a homologous speech center in their right hemisphere to compensate for the left hemisphere
when i was seventeen i visited dr schlaug 's lab and in one afternoon he walked me through some of the leading research on music and the brain
how musicians had fundamentally different brain structure than non musicians how music and listening to music could just light up the entire brain from our prefrontal cortex all the way back to our cerebellum
how music was becoming a neuropsychiatric modality to help children with autism to help people struggling with stress and anxiety and depression how deeply parkinsonian patients would find that their tremor and their gait would steady when they listened to music
and how late stage alzheimer 's patients whose dementia was so far progressed that they could no longer recognize their family could still pick out a tune by chopin at the piano that they had learned when they were children
but i had an ulterior motive of visiting gottfried schlaug and it was this that i was at a crossroads in my life trying to choose between music and medicine
i had just completed my undergraduate and i was working as a researchassistant at the lab of dennis selkoe studying parkinson 's disease at harvard
and i had fallen in love with neuroscience i wanted to become a surgeon i wanted to become a doctor like paul farmer or rick hodes these kind of
fearless men who go into places like haiti or ethiopia and work with aids patients with multidrug resistant tuberculosis or with children with disfiguring cancers i wanted to become that kind of red cross doctor that doctor without borders
on the other hand i had played the violin my entire life
music for me was more than a passion it was obsession it was oxygen i was lucky enough to have studied at the juilliard school in manhattan and to have played my debut with zubin mehta and the israeli philharmonic orchestra in tel aviv
and it turned out that gottfried schlaug had studied as an organist at the vienna conservatory but had given up his love
for music to pursue a career in medicine and that afternoon i had to ask him how was it for you making that decision
and he said that there were still times when he wished he could go back and play the organ the way he used to and that for me medical school could wait but that the violin simply would
not
and after two more years of studying music i decided to shoot for the impossible before taking the mcat and applying to medical school like a good indian son to become the next dr gupta
it was a wild dream to perform in an orchestra to perform in the iconic walt disney concert hall in an orchestra conducted now by the famous gustavo dudamel but much more importantly to me to be surrounded by musicians and mentors that became my new family
my new musical home
but a year later i met another musician who had also studied at juilliard one who profoundly helped me find my voice and shaped my identity
as a musician
nathaniel ayers was a double bassist at juilliard but he suffered a series of psychotic episodes in his early twenty s was treated with thorazine at bellevue and ended up living homeless on the streets of skid row in downtown los angeles thirty years later
and on the many times i saw nathaniel on skid row i witnessed how music was able to bring him back from his very darkest moments from what seemed to me in my untrained eye to be the beginnings of a schizophrenic episode
playing for nathaniel the music took on a deeper meaning because now it was about communication a communication where words failed a communication of a message that went deeper than words that registered at a fundamentally primal level in nathaniel 's psyche yet came as a true musicaloffering from me
i found myself growing outraged
that someone like nathaniel could have ever been homeless on skid row because of his mentalillness yet how many tens of thousands of others there were out there on skid row alone who had stories as tragic as his but were never going to have a book or a movie made about them that got them off the streets
but in the end it was nathaniel who showed me that if i was truly passionate about change if i wanted to make a difference i already had
perfect instrument to do it that music was the bridge that connected my world and his
there 's a beautiful quote by the romantic german composer robert schumann who said to send light into the darkness of men 's hearts such is the duty of the artist and this is a particularly poignant quote because schumann himself suffered from schizophrenia and died in asylum
and inspired by what i learned from nathaniel i started an organization on skid row of musicians called street symphony
bringing the light of music into the very darkest places performing for the homeless and mentally ill at shelters and clinics on skid row performing for combat veterans with post traumatic stressdisorder and for the incarcerated and those labeled as criminally insane
after one of our events at the patton state hospital in san bernardino a woman walked up to us and she had tears streaming down her face and she had a palsy she was shaking and she had this gorgeous smile and she said that she had never heard classical music before she didn 't think she was going to like it she had never heard a violin before but
suddenly what we 're finding with these concerts away from the stage away from the footlights out of the tuxedo tails the musicians become the conduit
for delivering the tremendous therapeutic benefits of music on the brain to an audience that would never have access to this room would never have access to the kind of music that we make
just as medicine serves to heal more than the building blocks of the body alone the power and beauty of music transcends the e in the middle of our beloved acronym
music transcends the aesthetic beauty alone
the synchrony of emotions that we experience when we hear an opera by wagner or a symphony by brahms or chamber music by beethoven compels us to remember our shared common humanity
the deeply communal connected consciousness the empathic consciousness that neuropsychiatrist iain mcgilchrist says is hard wired into our brain 's right hemisphere
and for those living in the most dehumanizing conditions of mentalillness within homelessness and incarceration the music and the beauty of music offers a chance for them to transcend the world around them
to remember that they still have the capacity to experience something beautiful and that humanity has not forgotten them
and the spark of that beauty the spark of that humanity transforms into hope
and we know whether we choose the path of music or of medicine that 's the very first thing we must instill within our communities within our audiences if we want to inspire healing from within
i 'd like to end with a quote by john keats the romantic english poet a very famous quote that i 'm sure all of you know
keats himself had also given up a career in medicine to pursuepoetry but he died when he was a year older than me and keats said beauty is truth and truth beauty that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know
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