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Gupta, Robert – TEDtalk Between music and medicine - 01
Identifier
021966
Type of Spiritual Experience
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A description of the experience
Robert Gupta: Between music and medicine TEDMED 2012 · 16:27 · Filmed Apr 2012
(Music) (Applause)
2:36 Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. It's a distinct privilege to be here.
2:45 A few weeks ago, I saw a video on YouTube of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at the early stages of her recovery from one of those awful bullets. This one entered her left hemisphere, and knocked out her Broca's area, the speech center of her brain. And in this session, Gabby's working with a speech therapist, and she's struggling to produce some of the most basic words, and you can see her growing more and more devastated, until she ultimately breaks down into sobbing tears, and she starts sobbing wordlessly into the arms of her therapist.
And after a few moments, her therapist tries a new tack, and they start singing together, and Gabby starts to sing through her tears, and you can hear her clearly able to enunciate the words to a song that describe the way she feels, and she sings, in one descending scale, she sings,
"Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine."
And it's a very powerful and poignant reminder of how the beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail, in this case literally speak.