Musical improvisation is an increasingly recognised rehabilitative therapy for people who have experienced traumatic brain injury initially thought to be `unreachable' or `non-responsive'.Music Therapy and Traumatic Brain Injury demonstrates how music therapy can be used to attend to the holistic, rather than purely functional, needs of people affected by severe head trauma. Divided into three parts, the first section provides an introduction to the effects brain injury has on a pe...

Despite years of study and advanced technologies, we still do not fully understand how the “typical” brain works, much less how an autistic brain works. And while we have become increasingly familiar with the term autistic thinking, people with autism are still misunderstood, leading to frustration, depression and missed opportunities to reach one’s potential. According to Peter Vermeulen, treatment of autism is still too focused on behavior and minimally focused on observation or determin...

What is it that accounts for the differences between musical beginners, advanced music makers, and world class performers? Virtually everyone likes music and has the capacity to be musical in some way (despite what some may say about themselves). Yet far fewer people come to be so involved with it that they identify themselves as musicians, and fewer still become musicians of international class. Psychology for Musicians provides the basis for answering this question. Examining th...

The most prominent feature of Borderline Personality Disorder is the depth and variability of moods. This emotional instability can also be called emotional lability or reactivity. Individuals with Borderline disorder struggle with despondency, anger, rage, self-hatred, arrogance, anxiety, uncertainty, emptiness, dependency, stubbornness and impulses of self-damage.

What type of practice makes a musician perfect? What sort of child is most likely to succeed on a musical instrument? What practice strategies yield the fastest improvement in skills such as sight-reading memorization and intonation? Scientific and psychological research can offer answers to these and other questions that musicians face every day. In The Science and Psychology of Music Performance Richard Parncutt and Gary McPherson assemble relevant current research findings and make them...

"Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) and Primary Resolution of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" provides a brief discussion illuminating the concept of PTSD: how it arises, what maintains it, how it progresses to increasingly constrain a person’s life. PTSD also involves faulty thinking, but focus on such present-time reactions is ineffective without addressing the original trauma. PTSD is the consequence of attempts to avoid re-experiencing. Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) is a techn...

'You are the music / While the music lasts' T.S. Eliot, The Four QuartetsDo babies remember music from the womb? Can classical music increase your child's IQ? Is music good for productivity? Can it aid recovery from illness and injury? And what is going on in your brain when Ultravox's 'Vienna', Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht or Dizzee Rascal's 'Bonkers' transports you back to teenage years?In a brilliant new work that will delight music lovers of every persuasion, music psycho...

A neurobiologically informed approach to a very difficult-to-treat disorder.This book addresses one of the fundamental, understudied issues of borderline personality disorder (BPD): dissociation and a lack of sense of self. Exploring dissociation from developmental, neurobiological,and behavioral perspectives, Russell Meares presents an original theory of BPD, offering new insights into this debilitating disorder and hope for recovery.BPD is not a new pheno...

A comprehensive survey of the latest neuroscientific research into the effects of music on the brainCovers a variety of topics fundamental for music perception, including musical syntax, musical semantics, music and action, music and emotionIncludes general introductory chapters to engage a broad readership, as well as a wealth of detailed research material for expertsOffers the most empirical (and most systematic) work on the topics of neural correlates o...

The voice is a powerful instrument in music therapy practice and this anthology of voicework techniques explores everything the practitioner and researcher needs to know in order to bring about successful vocal interventions across a broad range of client groups.Compiling a wealth of international evidence-based practice, this book offers detailed descriptions of clinical methods that are grounded in research. Chapters are grouped into structured and unstructured approaches for use...

Music's ability to express and arouse emotions is a mystery that has fascinated both experts and laymen at least since ancient Greece. The predecessor to this book 'Music and Emotion' (OUP, 2001) was critically and commercially successful and stimulated much further work in this area. In the years since publication of that book, empirical research in this area has blossomed, and the successor to 'Music and Emotion' reflects the considerable activity in this area. The Handbook of Music and ...

With the advent of modern cognitive neuroscience and new tools of studying the human brain "live," music as a highly complex, temporally ordered and rule-based sensory language quickly became a fascinating topic of study. The question of "how" music moves us, stimulates our thoughts, feelings, and kinesthetic sense, and how it can reach the human experience in profound ways is now measured with the advent of modern cognitive neuroscience. The goal of Rhythm, Music and the Brain is an attem...