Guest Post by Emily, NMTSA Therapist

Hi to all those reading this blog. I could go on and on about how amazing this family is and how much joy it brings me to work with them, however, my objective is to give you a knowledge base on what Neurological Music Therapy (NMT) is and an inside look as to how I apply it with Tony to help him meet and achieve his goals. NMT is an evidenced based model that utilizes music to transform the brain. The brain is a wondrous thing, always changing and adapting, helping us to learn and grow every single day.

Tony has a unique brain one that does not function in the same way a typical brain would function (and let’s face it, we’re all a little atypical so each of our brains are unique to us). However, the basic science of the brain is that everything we see (visual), that we hear (auditory), that we touch (tactile), that we feel (proprioceptive and vestibular), that we smell (olfactory) and that we taste (gustatory) is all information that the brain uses to make sense of this crazy world.

Now, imagine if your senses did not match up to the correct pathway or the pathway was blocked somewhere along the way or even perhaps there’s some faulty wiring so the message that is arriving is written in a foreign language that you can’t understand. How scared would you be if you couldn’t make sense of the world around you? How insecure and upset and frustrated would you be if something as simple as saying hello wouldn’t come out of your lips or being unable to control what you want your body to do?

As I’m sure you’ve read from previous posts, Tony has difficulty making sense of his world in the way that we make sense of it. He’s had to learn his own ‘brain language.’ He has difficulty sustaining any gross motor skills such as walking or sitting and even more difficulty with inhibiting certain gross motor skills such as running. Impulse control is another area in which Tony struggles daily with. It’s the job of an NMT to provide a new language, one that is in embedded in all of us from the moment we were conceived. This language, is the language of rhythm. Rhythm is our biggest tool that we use in NMT and has been proven again and again through studies conducted to help organize the brain and process incoming information in a way that is not confusing.

Before I go into more depth about how rhythm is used to aid Tony in sessions and in everyday life, I want to just briefly talk about why rhythm is so important and why it’s found in all of us. Rhythm in music itself is the structure of a musical piece. If the rhythm for as simple a song as “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” were changed, you would not be able to recognize it because it no longer represents the rhythm we were ingrained to know. Within our own bodies, we have innate rhythm or we wouldn’t be alive if our heart wasn’t continuously beating.

In NMT we use the power and versatility of rhythm to achieve many outcomes. For Tony in particular, rhythm is used to help organize his neural network and help messages get to their correct stations for informational input and processing through using a NMT technique called Auditory Perception Training (APT). It is also used to help him regulate his emotions through using rhythm to entrain his body to a specific tempo that is calming for him. (If you have ever found yourself tapping your foot along to an upbeat song, you are entraining to that particular rhythm or tempo (how fast or slow something is.)

This does not necessarily mean we put on a metronome (a device used that sustains a steady beat) at 60 beats per minute. For Tony, a calming tempo sits around 115 beats per minute because this is what his body naturally entrains to when there is no competing rhythms. However, because Tony has grown so much in the past year in a half, Tony has been challenged to entrain to several other tempos in order to increase his ability to adapt to several different stimuli and events beyond his control.

Once Tony’s body is entrained to the rhythm set, the rhythm then acts as a regulation tool, helping him maintain regulation of all his different sensory systems and reacting or responding to different tasks presented such as doing start and stop in the halls, sitting and receiving sensory input (such as deep pressure, brushing, etc.), communicating with his voice or through his device, and much more in relation to controlling his gross motor output.

Over the past year and a half of working with Tony, I’ve seen the effect that rhythm and other neurological music techniques have had on him and it continues to be a great pleasure in working with both Tony and his family in helping him achieve goals that at one point may have appeared unimaginable to one as simple as an onlooker who knew nothing of Tony’s background or as esteemed as a professional who knew all there was to know of Tony’s different challenges.

I encourage those of you reading this blog to always keep an open mind and an open heart to everyone you meet no matter if they have a diagnosis or not because a simple smile can make all the difference in the world.