After reading the research last week about how visiting art galleries, singing and painting can help improve health outcomes, I was also very inspired by my recent podcast with Emma Beswick (the episode is out next week incidentally!) as we talked about the parallels between music and science and our shared passion for music as Emma studied music at university and I sing jazz regularly. It got me thinking about how over many years in medicine, I have noticed that some of the most inspiring clinicians I have encountered have also been talented musicians. I suppose this sounds nonsensical – why would the logic of science overlap with the creativity of music?

But as Emma says in our podcast, music is as much about science and structure as it is about art and performance. And on the flip side medicine needs an element of creativity, discipline and perception that a musical brain brings.

I have written before about left and right brain lateralization. Whilst science tells us it is a myth that people are either left or right brained, it is true that some brain functions are more on one side of the brain that the other – for instance language skills tends to come from left side of the brain whereas processing emotional information comes from the right.

On deeper research I discovered that neuroscience has actually proved that in contrast music, science and mathematics activate overlapping regions of the brain. They require the simultaneous engagement of the left brain, which processes logic, sequence and structure and the right, which processes pattern and emotion. Musicians, it turns out, develop unusually strong connections between these two hemispheres. The corpus callosum, the bridge between left and right brain, is measurably thicker in trained musicians than in non musicians.

What this means is that a musician’s brain is very good at pattern recognition which of course is a huge skill in medicine. Not just recognising patterns, but sensing when a pattern is broken, when something does not resolve the way it should. A musician listens for melody, harmony and rhythm in the same way a healthcare professional looks for a constellation of symptoms in disease or the relationship between lifestyle, physiological and behavioural patterns.

In medicine, this matters enormously, as we know the human body is not a machine, but a complex, interconnected system where the emotional affects the physical and patterns of behaviour show through human biology in ways we are only beginning to understand. Recognising complexity in the body is crucial in terms of our understanding of illness and the delivery of healthcare.

The most creative clinicians I know are often the ones most comfortable with that complexity. They do not need everything to fit a neat diagnostic category and they are not just looking for the algorithm but the meaning, what is happening and why and respond in a way that fits the person in front of them rather than the average patient in a textbook. 

Dr Elizabeth Thompson