SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Music has power. It can soothe sadness, lift depression and express joy. It might also help people recover from injury.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROD SALAYSAY'S "HEARTSTRINGS")
ROD SALAYSAY: When you play for them, you'd see physiological changes in terms of blood pressure being a few points lower. Heart rate is a little bit slower. You know, they're breathing easier.
SIMON: That's Rod Salaysay, who's a post-surgery nurse at UC San Diego Health. Music has been part of his bedside manner for over 15 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROD SALAYSAY'S "HEARTSTRINGS")
SIMON: That's him playing an original he wrote called "Heartstrings," which he says he has played for patients over a thousand times.
SALAYSAY: And when you start to play at the bedside, you could actually see them relax a little bit. They sit back, adjust their pillows, maybe tap their hands, move their foot.
SIMON: Rod Salaysay remembers playing for a woman who was recovering from being hit by a car.
SALAYSAY: So I started playing for her, even though I know that she can't hear me. But when she finally woke up, she was saying that she heard some sounds. She can't really understand what it was, but that actually inspired me to write a song for her. It's called "You Can Make It Back."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN MAKE IT BACK")
SALAYSAY: (Singing) 'Cause life can be just like the ocean. Stormy seas toss you around.
What I look for is how they temporarily put their mind somewhere without worrying about the diagnosis, the IV alarms. It's just for 10 minutes that they're able to be at peace, and all they need to do is just to listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU CAN MAKE IT BACK")
SALAYSAY: (Singing) You can make it back.
CAROLINE PALMER: We know from a long time that music listening is known to reduce the sensation of pain in individuals, and it has the advantage of not having the side effects of medications.
SIMON: Caroline Palmer is a professor of psychology at McGill University in Montreal, who says we've known about the way music can affect the body and brain for a while.
PALMER: Pythagoras, a long time ago, knew that music affected our sensation of pain. We only recently have these better brain techniques for figuring out, how's the neural response to the brain changing from one beat to another? That's very hard to measure because there's so many neurons, and things happen fairly slowly in the brain compared to how quickly they happen in sound.
SIMON: Palmer says that musical tempo affects mood, and mood is affected by pain, so music might pick up your mood and perhaps lift your pain. But the power of music to move you physically, not just emotionally, can also be important to recovery.
PALMER: It's important that people want to move to music, that when they listen to music, they're rarely still. And these connections between the auditory and the motor cortex that we see as people learn music suggests that when you listen to music, your motor cortex is working, whether you're moving or not. And that could be another route to reducing pain, the fact that motor activity tends to lower someone's pain sensation.
SIMON: Palmer says scientists are still learning about how music might be used to help people recover and how it could affect acute and chronic pain. So far, no genre of music seems to be a clear favorite. That's why Rod Salaysay let his patients pick from his playlist.
SALAYSAY: Old jazz classics, "Summertime," "Minuet In G Minor," and, of course, on the ukulele, there's songs like "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW")
SALAYSAY: (Singing) Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
SIMON: That was post-surgery nurse Rod Salaysay and professor Caroline Palmer.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW")
SALAYSAY: (Singing) Over the rainbow. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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