This column is called ÒStaying AliveÓ for several reasons. One is the idea that knowing a little about applied public health can markedly improve your health. Yet now just knowing the beat of the Bee GeesÕ famous song can save many lives - including yours.

         ÒStaying AliveÓ was a huge seventiesÕ hit for the Australian group, but its popularity surged when John Travolta danced to its tune in ÒSaturday Night Fever.Ó According to the late, great Sarasotan Milt Felsen, line producer of the movie, TravoltaÕs partner and directorÕs girlfriend Karen Lynn Gorney was so talent challenged it was necessary to tie her feet to TravoltaÕs shoes to film the dance scenes.  Though her rock and roll group, ÒKarenÕs Band,Ó quickly disappeared, Travolta became and remains a major star.  Who knew Brooklyn could be so glamorous?

         It turns out itÕs not the melody and cultural resonances that make ÒStaying AliveÓ a significant public health promoter, but its rhythm.   The rules for cardiac compression during cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, require small, perfectly spaced small chest compressions applied 100 times a minute.

         How do you get people to do that?  Simple - music.  ÒStaying AliveÓ has a driving rhythm of 103 beats per minute.  Researchers have discovered itÕs nearly the perfect the song to pace CPR.

         Music and rhythm can also improve your life in other ways.

Music as Medicine

         Oliver Sachs was first celebrated for ÒAwakenings,Ó his memoir of successfully treating immobilized ParkinsonÕs patients. Like ÒSaturday Night Fever,Ó ÒAwakeningsÓ became another well regarded film depicting forgotten New YorkersÕ lives.  Sachs eventually became the foremost explicator of the brainÕs workings to the layman, demonstrating via  complex, personal narratives how the truth of the brain is far more bizarre than most science fiction. Recently he has been writing about musicÕs therapeutic powers.

         According to Sachs, playing music for children propulsively causes them to move to its rhythm. Soon they begin to dance, and then dance together,  as if the Pied Piper of Hamelin potentially lived in every piece of music, ready to play a tune to a rhythm set deep in the brain.  Sachs says other animals may respond to music but do not spontaneously move to it, and certainly not as a group.music,

         AlzheimerÕs patients who cannot communicate may still listen with wonder to a song. Though lacking all speech, they often begin to sing.  Stroke patients without speech may add their stilled voices to renditions of Happy Birthday.  It seems music attaches us to deep centers of emotional memory that persist even when much of what we call human identity has been erased. For many, music evokes memories like no other stimulus.  

         For thousands of years musicians have used song and melody to aid those suffering grief, sadness, and depression. Music also helps bind individuals into groups and units.  Estonians credit their immense public  choir festivals as the factor preserving national spirit during Soviet occupation.  Many cultures describe their national music as their greatest cultural heritage.

         Yet some uses of music are mundane.  Work songs have existed for thousands of years, perhaps for hundreds of thousands years throughout  prehistory.  The jogger listening to Vivaldi and the surgeon operating to arias from Madama Butterfly are routine examples among millions.

         So how does music work this magic?

The Rhythm of Life

         Tonality, pitch, and melody, are used by many species to communicate,  mate, define territory and identity.  Yet basic to all music is rhythm, and rhythm itself is basic to all life.

         First come our 24-hour body clock rhythms, internally pacing for us the changes of day and night.  Terrestrial life has so thoroughly  adopted these internal 24-hour rhythms that animals living  in the perpetual midnight depths of the Pacific Trench, where light does not reach, still follow them exactly. The importance of these 24 hour rhythms, called circadian, has only begun to be appreciated.

         And there are many more rhythms.  Neurotransmitters secrete in cycles of milliseconds.  Internal body clocks pace out  at 60 and 90 minutes, allowing many of us to wake right before the alarm clock chimes. There are monthly rhythms, like those of menstruation,  rhythms that change with the appearance of  the moon, multiple rhythms of the seasons and the year. Without these rhythms animals cannot hibernate, birds cannot fly across the world to reach exact destinations, crops cannot be seeded, grown, and harvested. These multitudinous rhythms are the armature of life, timing everything that all living beings do.

         Music taps directly into these deep biological structures, helping create who and  what we are.   Deeply embedded in our cells, brains, memories and emotions, music can, and should be, vital to oneÕs life.

Dr. Matthew Edlund practices sleep medicine and psychiatry in Sarasota.  His new book, Designed To Last, is available online. He can be reached at 365-4308 and via his Web site at doctoredlund.com.