Main content

4. Stroke Rehabilitation

Stroke rehabilitation is the focus of this episode of ‘How Music Heals’. Psychotherapist Philippa Perry meets a music therapist who uses neuroscience to retrain the brain.

In this episode, psychologist and author Philippa Perry meets Ellie Ruddock who has trained in neurologic music therapy and specialises working with stroke victims, enabling her clients to relearn and retrain their brains to absorb new information. She explains to Philippa how the rhythmic power of music can facilitate physical recovery, particularly in learning to walk again.

Ellie helps Philippa encode some new information herself, using music therapy and they discuss music’s unique ability to bypass the parts of the brain that are damaged and forge new neural pathways in rehabilitation therapy. Recent discoveries in neuroscience are now catching up with what humans have known for centuries – that music occupies more parts of our brains than language does, and that it can calm, organize and heal.

The neurologist Oliver Sachs said: "The power of music to integrate and cure is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest non-chemical medication." This programme focuses on music’s extraordinary ability to heal.

Available now

14 minutes

Last on

Thu 25 Sep 2025 21:45

Broadcast

  • Thu 25 Sep 2025 21:45

Death in Trieste

Death in Trieste

A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.

Watch: My Deaf World

Watch: My Deaf World

Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.

The Book that Changed Me

Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.

Podcast