Music awakens us and connects us

For this week's blog, I would like to share an experience Dustin Hoffman had when he was a young man working as a nurse's aide at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In the January 21 2013 New Yorker he tells a story of an old man who had been a brilliant doctor in his day. Now, due to several strokes, the man was practically vegetative. "He would shuffle up and down the hall mumbling--endlessly repeating numbers or just going, 'Budabudabuda.' 

His wife visited him every day and Dustin Hoffman often played the piano for the patients. One day he played 'Goodnight, Irene.'  "Suddenly, and he [the patient] had never done this before, he started singing...'Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight.' Then he saw her [his wife] and he got up, and he walked towards her, and he put his arms around her. and she was deeply touched, deeply moved, and she said, 'Sit down, we'll have lunch, we'll talk.' And--I swear to God--he looked at her, so sadly, and he cried, 'I can't! I caaaan't' And he went right back into his state."

While this is in many ways a sad story, it moved me to see the power of music at that moment. It gave that couple a window through which to connect, if only ever so briefly. As I ponder the "isolation of consciousness" (a term referred to by Radio Lab's Jad Abumrad), I see that we strive to overcome that isolation and connect with each other. Music gives us those moments. We don't know what mysteries of the brain creates those moments, but for now let's be grateful that they are there and that we have music to share with each other.