In youth ministry, I’ve always been disturbed by the extent to which my charges invest their identity into music. To ride in the van with the wrong radio station playing seems unthinkable to them. So much of who teenagers are is wrapped up in pop songs. When a favorite plays, they perk up in rapt attention, lost to all else. I always wish that they could pour that energy and love into something more constructive.
However, maybe it was inevitable. The documentary Alive Inside shows us a similar effect, but in a different population: elderly men and women suffering from dementia. We see nursing home residents sitting in a catatonic states, barely able to speak and unable to recognize close family members. Their memory is too far gone. Then, someone puts headphones on their ears and starts an iPod. When they hear their favorite songs from youth, their faces, bodies and minds wake up. They are more lucid and animated than they have been in years, and it’s not just the music. They are more able to talk to people and remember familiar faces. It’s as if the music carries their spirits back to them.
For the patients and those who love them, this is a discovery of great joy. Somehow, the music invokes personalities that had seemed lost. What had seemed dead was, as the title says, alive inside, just waiting for the music to call it back. For us watchers, too, the joy is infectious. I especially remember one woman with early-onset Alzheimers, who looks like she should be more socially able than she is and who is aware enough to be angry at her circumstances. When she hears the Beatles, she transforms into the woman she would be without her sickness.
All of this is explained scientifically. Dr. Oliver Sacks, among others, reports that music engages more parts of the brain than any other stimulus. All of us, when listening to music, engage in complex cognitive activity. So, it makes scientific sense for dementia patients to respond more fully to music than to other stimuli. Yet, the filmmakers also use the language of soul and spirit to express what’s happening. They can’t help themselves – what was dead is alive again. Without intending to, Alive Inside offers excellent evidence for the fully-embodied, non-dualist understanding of humanity offered by many of Fuller’s leading lights.
Alive Inside does more than just report on this joyful phenomenon; it advocates for music as treatment. The “star” of the film is Dan Cohen, a former social worker who discovered the musical awakening while volunteering at a nursing home. He founded the organization Music and Memory to bring personalized music to the millions of patients who could benefit from it. The film was made because he asked the director, Michael Rossato-Bennett, to film him for a day. Rossato-Bennett tells us that this one day turned into a three-year project because he was so inspired by what he witnessed.
Watching the film, you too might be inspired. I know that I’m convinced about music as therapy, and I wish Cohen and his organization success. But, one aspect of their work did give me pause. The music always comes from an iPod through headphones; it’s always a private listening experience. Even as we watch the patients on film, they’re wearing headphones and we’re hearing a dub. I wonder if a live performance would provide the same powerful, complex stimulus. Do we invest our identity in music or in particular, precise recordings of music?
I’m also more convinced about music as worship. I have wondered why we, along with our Jewish forebears, spend so much time singing, and I have often heard the practical answer that singing the truths of God drives those truths far deeper into us than merely hearing them. Liturgy preaches better than sermons do. Alive Inside offers a profound rationale for musical worship. If experiencing music means investing our identity in it, shouldn’t we invest in the glory of God?
;