I’m at one end of the couch, my 88-year-old father at the other in the living room of his condo in Fountain Hills, Arizona. We could easily pass for strangers, but not because of our limited contact since he moved here from New Jersey 28 years ago. Encroaching dementia has estranged my father from me as well as from himself.…
Few things unleash memories as vividly as a favorite song from our past. We don’t just remember the tune; we can often recall exactly where we were, whom we were with, sometimes even what we were wearing when we first heard a tune on our personal Top Hits list. There are a number of reasons for this powerful recollection, including…
Many of us on the Rewire Me staff are what you might call neuroscience nerds. We love digging in to the latest research on the brain and thinking about how it could improve people’s lives. So we couldn’t resist listening in on the presentations at “Neuroscience 2013,” a conference that brought together 30,000 neuroscientists from around the world. Among many…
I grew up in a home that was within earshot of railroad tracks. As a young boy, I had a fanciful notion about what the sound of the choo-choo going by meant. I thought the train was rising in the air and taking off like an airplane as the pitch went higher, then landing out of town as the pitch…
Certain types of sounds have therapeutic value, especially for alleviating anxiety. In a study commissioned by Spotify, the digital music service, anxiety psychologist Dr. Becky Spelman of the Private Therapy Clinic in London and her research team investigated music’s ability to relieve anxiety, especially flight anxiety. Here is Spotify’s playlist, Calming Music to Fly To, based on Dr. Spelman’s research:…
As a child I was never fond of classical music or opera, though my father used to blare opera music throughout our home. He would sit on the floor with my sister beside him, singing and explaining what the arias were all about. I had no patience for it. In my early 20s a cousin took me to see Turandot,…
