My daughter, Nancy, recently moved her baby grand piano into my home so she can play while she is in Fullerton. This inspired me to take piano lessons at CSUF’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI).

I may never progress beyond the first two lines of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played with my right hand alone, but it brings me great joy. It also supports my motor skills, engages my brain, and serves as a form of emotional therapy.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in “Musicophilia” (2007) about using music as a therapeutic intervention for patients with Parkinson’s disease. His work helped advance our understanding of music therapy in treating neurological injuries and disorders. In one case, he described a patient who, after being struck by lightning, felt an unexpected urge to play the piano — a sign of music’s deep neurological reach.

Similarly, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in 2011, underwent extensive speech and physical therapy to recover lost function. Among her rehabilitation efforts, relearning the French horn, an instrument she had played as a teenager, helped strengthen neural connections and contributed to her ability to regain aspects of speech and communication (American Psychological Association. (2026, March). Monitor on Psychology, 57(2).

While there is no single “music center” in the brain, most people possess an innate ability to perceive tone, timbre, pitch, melody, harmony, and rhythm. Music engages multiple brain systems, including those responsible for cognition, memory, attention, pattern recognition, sensorimotor integration, learning, and emotion. Through active engagement and rhythmic synchronization, it can influence speech, movement, pain perception, and mood.

Sensorimotor synchronization (tapping, moving, or breathing in time with music) appears to enhance music’s pain-relieving and regulatory effects. Moving in rhythm with sound strengthens the connection between the brain’s auditory and motor systems.

The science of music is also closely tied to identity and personal meaning. Music activates the brain’s reward pathways, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex, which is more strongly engaged when we choose music ourselves than when it is chosen for us. This region is associated with self-referential thinking, internal goals, values, and a sense of agency.

The applications of music therapy are broad and expanding. They include chronic pain management, treatment of depression and anxiety, emotional regulation in individuals with autism, restoration of speech after traumatic brain injury, and reduction of psychological distress in cancer patients.

One evidence-based approach, rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS), is used in neurological music therapy to help individuals with Parkinson’s disease improve gait and balance through rhythmic cueing. The method draws on the natural link between music and movement — the same instinct that sets our feet tapping in time with a beat.

Other emerging approaches combine music with visual stimulation to help reconnect neural networks in individuals with mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vol. 11, No. 6, 2016).

Music is often more powerful than language in conveying emotion. One need only think of a Thursday evening performance at the Muckenthaler to understand its impact. According to my Apple Watch, my heart rate climbs during live music, and it comes with chills and a sense of emotional arousal. What about you?

Music ultimately reminds us that healing is not only biological but deeply human. It reaches places in us that language cannot, restoring connection where there is fragmentation and vitality where there is fatigue. In its simplest form — a melody, a rhythm, a familiar tune — it returns us to ourselves, and to one another, in ways that are both measurable in the brain and felt in the heart long after the final note fades.