Music Therapy Soothes Aging, Impaired Brains : Neurology: Attention focuses on slowing the manifestations of nerve damage, using power of a patient’s own emotions.

A man in his early 70s hadn’t spoken in two years, for reasons unknown to his doctors. Then Connie Tomaino, a music therapist, noticed he was listening to the Yiddish folk songs she played for him and her other neurologically impaired geriatric patients.

Soon, whenever she played the folk songs he began to cry. Then he started to hum along with the music. After two months he began to speak.

Tomaino has spent 15 years as a music therapist, researching ways to help people like this man who have lost even the most basic memories, including how to speak and understand.

Her work is not psychotherapy, in which music is used to help people deal with life problems. Rather, it has a neurological focus, aimed at slowing the manifestations of nerve damage using a patient’s own emotions.

Tomaino, president of the American Assn. for Music Therapy, has worked for the last 12 years at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx with the famed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, whose experiences were the basis of the film, “Awakenings.”

When she completes her doctoral dissertation next year, she hopes to show that it’s possible to improve the memories of such patients using music as a stimulus.

“There is a direct communication between the auditory nerve and the emotional sensor,” Tomaino said. “Even people who have severe neurological damage, who are not reachable with other therapies, have an emotional response to the music. This can stimulate other areas of the brain that are latent, triggering them to function.”

Tomaino uses a piano, guitar or accordion to play music that was popular during a patient’s late teens and early 20s, because “it’s the music they recall the best.”

As a result, she said, people “become more attentive and use their voices more. They become aware of people around them who they haven’t responded to before.”

“Something must be going on in there,” she said.

“All humans are innately musical,” said Dr. Frank R. Wilson, a neurologist with the Permanente Medical Group in San Francisco. “This aptitude is as deeply rooted in the nervous system and as integral to life as is the gift of language.”

Wilson testified last summer before the Senate Special Committee on Aging at a hearing on possible funding for programs to help the elderly live fuller lives. He is vice president of The Biology of Music Making Inc., an organization that sponsors conferences of health professionals, scientists and educators addressing the biological elements of music.

“Music arises spontaneously from a brain whose operations are inherently rhythmic, harmonic, patterned and sequential,” said Wilson, who is also an associate clinical professor of neurology at UC San Francisco Medical Center. “Perhaps this is why it is both a stimulus and a powerful organizer of movement, thought, language and emotion,” he said.

Tomaino recently presented her clinical findings at a New York conference sponsored by MEDART International, an organization of arts therapists and medical professionals.

“There are always skeptics, but the neurologists and other medical professionals I talk to think it’s a great idea,” Tomaino said.

“There are enormous possibilities in Connie’s work,” Wilson said. “There is a terrible lack of research and a crying need for more.”

“Connie’s work is unique, highly effective and motivating,” said Clive Robbins, co-director of the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Clinic at New York University. “It’s a totally different way of dealing with how a person functions neurologically.”

Robbins, who works with children, describes the effect of music on a damaged brain as an example of the whole being greater than its parts.

“Normally separate functions are combined when the brain hears music,” he said. “So it reaches a level of function and comprehension that purely technical procedures don’t reach.”

Brigitte Mercier, a music therapy intern at Beth Abraham, uses Tomaino’s methods to work with less severely impaired patients, like those in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

“The less the brain is stimulated, the faster the patient deteriorates,” Mercier said. She said music therapy can’t cure neurological problems, but it can slow the effects of deterioration. “The more you can slow it, the better things are for everyone: the patient, the family and the care givers.”

Mercier said one of her patients, who was a professional dancer years ago, sits silently in a wheelchair all day. When she starts to play music on her guitar or piano, he gets up and dances.

And a woman who is unresponsive to anything else, who hallucinates and whose speech is rambling, responds to Mercier’s guitar by singing the blues. “And she knows all the lyrics,” Mercier said.

Medical professionals “realize there’s more to the brain than we can understand; there are no cut-and-dried answers,” Tomaino said. “Just because they can’t test it or observe it all the time doesn’t mean it’s not possible.”