Data di Pubblicazione:
2017
Abstract:
Parkinsonians and Aphasics get often able to move and talk,
respectively, with music. Looking at that is fascinating: it looks like if
the breath of the Spirit would suddenly have given life to an almost
inanimate creature! How it works? It is not completely clear, but,
objectively, it seems to work. It looks like as if a motor / phasic pattern
is not destroyed, just permanently inhibited, and music is in turn able
to inhibit the inhibitor: the Parkinsonian dances, the Aphasic sings.
Then, the dancer comes to walk, the singer to talk. This is suggestive
about the possibility that dance or running - anyway continuous
rhythmic movement - is the ground of our movement: brain evolved to
move, in order to escape predators, catch preys and mate, and running,
dancing, walking at a given pace is more stable than just standing, like
for a bicycle, both having just two "points" of touching the ground,
instead of the three needed to stay still passively. Starting or stopping
walking is more demanding - in term of control - than just keeping
doing? A train of evoked potential, accorded to the natural frequency
of the processing neural network - around 10 Hz for occipital visual
cortex for instance - is less demanding than single stimuli, each one
eliciting the 10 Hz frequency - peaking about 100 milliseconds after the
stimulus at P100 then immediately decaying.
This even suggests that our first natural communication language
would have been singing, like birds, then superposing words, finally
became able to flu alone: probably music and rhythm restore such a
phylogenetic path inhibiting the inhibition to sing or dance provoked
either by the sudden stroke in Aphasics or by the chronic degeneration
in Pakinsonians. Rhythm is in fact a kind of breath, and relaxed -
relaxing breath is rhythmic, entraining the parasympathetic high
frequency in the heart rate variability spectrum as opposed to the
sympathetic low frequency witnessing stress. Thus, musicotherapy
may also be view, at least in part, as a kind of emotionally dear vagal
stimulation, not so far from the traditional vagal stimulation sometimes
used in pharmacy-resistant epilepsy: apparently, 3 very different
pathologies, probably related by a different - but commonly grounded
- problem of rhythm: electrically, epilepsy cortically appear in EEG just
as a diffused hyper-sincronisation of the brain around 3 Hz triggered
by the focus. Vagal stimulation in this view is a kind of defibrillator, as
music could be for the inherited inhibition to move or talk. In Talmud,
one of the worst consequences of evil would be music deprivation: "if
we will have been bad, God will deprivate us of music": harmony will
be lost, as we metaphorically say even in modern language. On the
contrary, enthusiasm, also coming from musicotherapy in groups of
both patients and therapists, and even just spectators, ethnologically
is literally to breath in god - En Thous i Asthm - at His rhythm! A
Community - a group in therapy - often gets better results than a single
patient: would it be wise to even mix speaking Parkinsonians and
not leg-plegic Aphasics? If really the problem is the same of rhythms,
maybe the latter could drive Parkinsonians to dance, while the former
could drive Afasic to talk, vicariating each other the main impairment
through the respective residual ability, emotionally sustaining each
other on the ground of the common - though different - disease.
Tipologia CRIS:
02.01 Contributo in volume (Capitolo o Saggio)
Keywords:
rythm; musicotherapy; inhibition; revovery; parkinson's; aphasia; epilepsy
Elenco autori:
Liberati, Diego
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