The Brain and Music

Tweet Immunity, too, can benefit. South African researchers have successfully used Bach’s Magnificat to benefit mood, boost the immune system and lower stress hormones in people undergoing physiotherapy for infectious lung disease. Regularly listening can also lower high blood pressure. Patients who listened to 25 minute of music a day for four weeks lowered their […]

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Tweet One of my mentors, Dr. Joel Elkes, once said that just as music has the power to heal, it also has the power to harm. Last week I was in Miami, South Beach to be exact. Nearly every store and restaurant I walked past had electronic-sounding disco music blaring onto the street. Every coffee […]

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Tweet This year I wanted to do a special Father’s Day Issue in memory of my own father, the Rev. Dr. Michael Benjamin Hudnall. Daddy was a United Methodist minister in the S.C. Conference of the United Methodist Church. I was born in Durham, N.C. while he was in seminary at Duke University on the […]

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Tweet Well, tomorrow’s my birthday!! And it’s one of the big ones. I’ll let you guess: One late May afternoon, at Duke University Hospital (Watts Hospital) a baby girl was born to Benjamin and Alice Adelaide (“Tumpy”) Hudnall. The year was 1948 and I was their firstborn. My father was just about to get his […]

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Tweet   The news has been hard to miss: in study after study, scientists are finding correlations between music making and some of the deepest workings of the human brain. Research has linked active music making with better language and math ability, improved school grades, better-adjusted social behavior, and improvements in “spatial-temporal reasoning,” which is […]

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