O Say Can You Sing

Since he was a baby, Charlie’s favorite things have all had something to do wtih music: There was the little Vtech toy radio that played “Old McDonald” and “How Much Is That Doggy In the Window?”; now he has his iPod, a big case with our CDs, and his bag of music books. I took piano lessons from my elementary school years until I graduated from high school and it really is a thrill for me to see Charlie learn to play himself. I stand beside him when he practices and memory after memory of hours spent practicing the piano floats in. I do concur with neurologist Oliver Sacks about the importance of music lessons on the developing brain, as he notes in a September 24th Wired interview:

Wired: From the perspective of neurological development, is it important to give music lessons to your kids?

Sacks: One can become a creative and good human being without music lessons. But it does look as if fairly intensive musical training can promote the development of various parts of the brain, which may facilitate other non-musical cognitive powers.

Piano lessons help Charlie learn in some way that (I’ll theorize) draws on parts of his brain and cognition that language, words, speech does not seem to. The ancient Greeks knew what they were doing when they included musical training as part of a young citizen’s education.

To end this post on a literally musical note, here is a video of an autistic man singing the national anthem on Disability Awareness Day at Fenway Park. About halfway through, he pauses, laughs for some moments, and the crowd picks up the tune. And he joins in the singing, too—just as Charlie, once a child who could not talk, now joins Jim in singing the songs crooned to him since his birth, including “Best Friend.”