Music Therapy Association

Music Therapy, and How its Related to Music
What is the American Music Therapy Association?

The American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) is a progressive development of the therapeutic use in medical rehabilitation, much like in the movie presented to us The Music Never Stopped. The mission of the AMTA is to advance people in public awareness of the benefits of their practice and to increase the access to quality music therapy services in a quickly changing world. This association also represents over five-thousand music therapists, corporate members, and related associations worldwide. AMTA’s roots even date back to organizations founded in 1950 and 1971! Of those organizations two merged in 1998 to ensure the progressive development

Activations such as this are responsible for some of the arousing effects of music and may also contribute to the feeling we get that when music makes us want to ‘move to the beat’. Three of the main focuses of the core emotion brain network are the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens, and the hippocampus. The way the amygdala connects to music is that music stimulates this brain structure in a similar way to faces, smells and other sounds. Also the amygdala likely has a role in how we evaluate and learn about positive as well as negative stimuli and therefore is involved in how our behavior becomes reinforced towards, or away, from certain musical sounds. The nucleus accumbens (NA) is well known by many scientists to be activated by peak emotional experiences, known as chills or fission, but it is also activated as soon as music is experienced as pleasurable. This finding suggests that music can be very rewarding stimulus. The most important, though to me on the brain connecting music to memories that can be helpful to music therapy is the hippocampus. This brain structure is mainly responsible for the memory of music, musical experiences, and contexts. Within the movie presented we can even hear this never ending conversation of memories connected with music and how Gabriel can always pinpoint a memory with a song but not much else. You can in fact even hypothesize that music is laid down in a unique way in

Gabby took a bullet to the brain and it left her in critical condition. The Congresswoman from Arizona since has been able to relearn how to talk—a feat partly credited to music therapy. The bullet hit her in the left side of the brain, mainly where things such as speech are controlled, as to where her words had abandoned her. Since speech is triggered by the left side of the brain and music is controlled all over, scientists have discovered that speech can be mended once again on the right side of the brain. That’s exactly what happened to Gabby. She would go to intense one-hour therapy sessions. The therapy can be frustrating and emotional for aphasic patients, whose inability to speak is no reflection on their intelligence. Another individual who music therapy has helped is a young man named Chis Stephan who before his incident was a football player at their high school. Chris got injured in a car accident one night and sustained a traumatic brain injury. The doctors were concerned when a week later he still had not awoken from his coma, as to where he awoke thirty days later he still needed help getting back to being himself. That is where music therapy stepped in. The music and sessions helped Chris to make his voice stronger and louder as they sing songs and do breathe support exercises with music. His walking also has become more rhythmic and faster as he practices walking to the rhythm of the