During the holiday season in particular; music adds another dimension of emotion, richness and joy to our lives.  After my near-death experience, I began to research why music touches us so deeply to the core of our being. What I found was astonishing. It also helped me unravel a mystery about my daughter with special needs. I share an excerpt from the chapter, Spiritual Beings-Clay Vessels, in my book, Quarks of Light;

All these years I have been puzzled by how Maria still gets excited when she hears music that she heard repeatedly at age two. In Rett Syndrome girls, the MECP2 gene responsible for making the protein essential for normal nerve cell function in the brain, stops expressing at approximately twenty-four months. The brain is unable to complete the wiring process slowing further development and impeding the ability to retain memory.

In 1999, the Dixie Chicks were wildly popular when their first album “Fly” hit the airwaves. Maria’s caregiver at the time was a huge fan, playing that album constantly. To this day, when Maria is in pain or I need to brighten her mood, all I have to do is play that music and her disposition becomes positive. How can this be if her brain has not finished wiring? I decide to research how and where the brain stores music and come across research conducted by scientists at the Department of Neurology at the Virchow campus in Berlin, Germany.

They examined a man who lost all of his memories but retained his ability to remember and learn songs. The patient was a 68-year-old professional cellist who developed encephalitis. The inflammation caused him to develop amnesia so severe that he cannot remember his professional or personal past (retrograde amnesia), family or friends, or acquire new information (ante retrograde amnesia). Despite this condition, his musical memory remained intact. Furthermore, the patient was still able to sight-read and play the cello.

The scientists in Berlin have proven that music is emotional, primal, and spiritual. If music has great power to call to our highest selves then it can have the opposite power too. I come upon the work of Peter Slight, M.D., a retired Oxford University researcher, who studied the effect of music on cardiac rhythms. He discovered that blood pressure and heart rate rise and fall to match the volume and pace of music.

Other research has revealed that musical phrases, chants or recited prayers that hit a 10-beat rhythm seem to sync with what is called the Meyer wave, which is the natural ebb and flow of heart rate and blood pressure. I had always wondered why music was so powerful and, in many ways, also a universal language that connects us all—just like the web. Dr. Sleight ends the article I read on this note, “Ironically, the ‘Ave Maria’ composed by Franz Schubert in 1825, hits this 10-beat rhythm perfectly.”