Giffords suffered from aphasia - the inability to speak due to damage to language pathways in the left hemisphere of his brain. But the words of the top layers of melody and rhythm, your brain is trained to use a less traveled route to the same destination.
"Music is another way to return to the language," Meaghan said Morrow, therapist Giffords' music and a brain injury specialist at TIRR Memorial Hermann Certified Rehabilitation Hospital in Houston. Morrow compared the process to a highway bypass.
"You can not go on in that way anymore," he said, but "you can go out and turn around and get where you need to go."
The brain's ability to pave new paths around the damaged area is called neuroplasticity. An adult can learn to speak again - with proper training and lots of practice, according to Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, associate professor of neurology and director of the Laboratory for Music and neuroimaging at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.
Schlaug compared the process of learning to play the piano at the age of 50 or 60.
"It would be much more laborious process of doing that than if you were to start at age 6 or 7 years," he said.
PHOTO: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords music therapy
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Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., Underwent ... View full size
PHOTO: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords music therapy
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Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., Underwent music therapy as part of their recovery.
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The brain is a network of connections. The most commonly used are reinforced over time - as highways. The weakest links are still there, but as small roads.
To help regain her speech, the connection has to be transformed from a one-lane road on a highway, Schlaug said.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists have begun to map the brain's many functions to specific regions. While the language is very much out on the left side of the brain, visual music activates motor areas, and coordination of both sides as well as deep brain areas involved in memory and emotion.
"Nothing activates the brain so extensively as the music," said Dr. Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at Columbia University and author of the book, "Musicophilia."
Read about aphasia in Dr. Sacks' latest book "Musicophilia"
Sacks account of music therapy in Parkinson's disease stimulated the book and movie "Awakenings."
"It has been known for centuries, literally, people talk, people who have lost speech, he can sing," he said, citing a 1871 article by neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, entitled "Singing for children without speech."
"Everyone knew, but was not explored or exploited," said Sacks.
In the last decade, the ability of music to language access in the brain has been explored in great detail, and exploited as a means to regain speech after brain injury.
These patients "have a few words somewhere", but must be "deceived or seduced to discover," said Sacks.
However, many people are skeptical about the benefits of music therapy, and few insurers that cover. Schlaug is conducting a clinical trial of "melodic intonation therapy" in aphasic stroke patients, compared with speech therapy or no treatment at all.
Schlaug trial involves 75 hours intensive therapy sessions. Therapy can be frustrating and emotional aphasic patients whose inability to speak is not a reflection of his intelligence.
That frustration was visible on the face of Giffords, "said Morrow. But the results were well worth the effort.
"It took me a couple of days, but she
started giving me a thumbs up," said Morrow. "Then we began to open his mouth making a humming something. Then they become words in recent weeks."And through songs like "Happy Birthday," "American Pie" and his favorite, "Brown Eyed Girl," Giffords slowly opened the way back to the language.
"When I first saw Gabby and I sang the song with it," Morrow said, "I knew that things would get better."