Over the years, I’ve heard from lots of artists, writers, architects and the like, saying they like to listen to music while they work. Why shouldn’t doctors do that too? I feel I work better with music going (Jamie T’s “Kings and Queens” is playing as I write this), and it seems like lots of people feel the same way.
We’ve done a number of shows dealing with music therapy, and neuroscience’s current fascination with music’s apparent ability to reduce stress and help with the healing process. If music can really impact how patients deal with pain and stress, it stands to reason that it could also affect how a surgeon performs under what can also be very stressful situations.
I first wondered about this maybe 10 years ago, when I had a minor operation to repair a hernia. I knew it was a minor operation and that the surgeon was expert at this sort of thing, and that I’d be walking, albeit gingerly, home that same day. So I wasn’t too nervous, even though I was still awake when they wheeled me into the operating room. Before the anaesthesia took effect, though, I saw the surgeon and the other staff standing around in that nasty hospital lighting, and suddenly I was nervous. The thought flashed by in an instant, because the anaesthesia was about to do its job, but I remember lying there thinking, “couldn’t they have some music or something going here?” I know it was an operating room, but it seemed more like a tomb. A disconcerting thought to have before any kind of medical procedure…
Would you want your surgeon to be listening to music while operating on you? Do you work better with music playing?
John Schaefer has hosted Soundcheck since the show’s inception in 2002. He has also hosted and produced WNYC’s radio series New Sounds since 1982 (“The No. 1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard) and the New Sounds Live concert series since 1986.
Comments [3]
I just had surgery to correct a vertical misalignment of my eyes. While going through the adjustable suture part of the surgery, Kings of Leon's, Use Somebody blared from a boom box in the background. I love this song and having to have my eyes tugged and tied up with fishing wire like string it helped me get through it. Weeks after the surgery I realized the lyrics were strangely fitting. The first line in the song is "I was runnin' around looking down at all I see..." I was having surgery to correct an eye that was looking down for the last 40 years of my life.
Glad to have had a song I liked and that my surgeon liked during a difficult procedure.
Thank you for sharing this story, it was wonderful to listen to and read.
You may find our old DARPA program to use computer music to guide the hand of the surgeon. http://www.casi.net/D.TADs/D.TacticalAudioWhitePaper/NEWWhitePaper01.htm
Our project was to:Tactical Audio for Surgical Navigation
SOUND : i.e., auditory and musical perception is not used at all in modern surgery. CASI's new technology expands the surgeon's situational awareness using novel sonification strategies in support of tactical placement tasks. Consider the difficulty surgeons face in manually performing surgery while at the same time visually perceiving navigational guidance from a surgical planning system(e.g. digitized information is not intuitively registered and integrated with the patient). CASI addresses the problems of ergonomics delivery of the navigational guidance to the ears and hands of the operator. We base our algorithms on inverting the musical performer?s paradigm. A musician places their fingers precisely and accurately with the intent to produce sounds in ?tune?. We use elements of computer music and musical perception to enable the surgeon to place their instruments precisely and accurately by adjusting sound properties so that proper instrument placement sounds in ?tune?.
The use of audio feedback as a partial or total replacement for certain visual navigational guidance systems in the operating room can overcome this limitation. The aural modality is a comparatively rich modality which is relatively unencumbered in the operating room. Furthermore, auditory perception is both parallel - capable of discriminating between multiple simultaneous sensoria - and omnidirectional (e.g. in hearing a sound, one is not obliged to aim one?s ear directly at the sound source). We believe a properly designed and applied audio guidance system can transcend the limitation image-guided systems encounter [4], and can provide an intuitive and information-rich interface for the surgeon.
I'm a teacher and have to write comments for my 90some students at the end of each quarter. I get a cold soda, dim the lights, crank up whatever I'm listening to an plow through them in about 4 hours. Without the music, I'm sure it would take me 4 times as long.
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