It's hardly news that listening to music can make you feel good. In a Valley full of all stripes of therapy, music therapy is one of the most intuitive types around. But doctors, including one just down the road at Mass. General Hospital, are discovering the scientific side of why that's true, and what potential exists for specific medical uses of music. They're also discovering the details of why, for instance, playing rock at ear-bleed volume brought Manuel Noriega out of hiding during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama (one wonders how often they played Van Halen's "Panama").

Research efforts and the clinical use of music have offered very specific results so far. In a recent MSNBC story, author Bill Briggs enumerated much of that research. Briggs reports that, though we may not necessarily realize it's happening, heart rates sometimes change to match a tempo. That's according to Dr. Claudius Conrad, a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, who told Briggs, "Research has already shown that if you play a piece—like Mozart—at a certain slow beat, the listener will adapt their heart beat to the beat of the music."

Wild as that alone may sound, that's just the beginning. Briggs continues: "Based on interviews with neurologists and cardiologists, the journey from an instrument string to your heart strings goes something like this: Sound waves travel through the air into the ears and buzz the eardrums and bones in the middle ears. To decode the vibration, your brain transforms that mechanical energy into electrical energy, sending the signal to its cerebral cortex—a hub for thought, perception and memory. Within that control tower, the auditory cortex forwards the message on to brain centers that direct emotion, arousal, anxiety, pleasure and creativity. And there's another stop upstairs: that electrical cue hits the hypothalamus which controls heart rate and respiration, plus your stomach and skin nerves, explaining why a melody may give you butterflies or goose bumps. ... But what surprised Conrad is that the patients also showed a 50 percent spike in pituitary growth hormone, which is known to stimulate healing."

Several studies are underway, and music-savvy doctors are employing music (primarily classical, it seems) in hospital rooms and even surgical suites to aid healing.

In an age when nanotechnology, tissue-cloning and even human-machine interfaces point toward a high-tech, sometimes anxiety-producing vision of the future, there's something quite comforting about the notion of a very old and pleasant form of human interaction proving so useful. Maybe the future will be more Ursula LeGuin than Robert Heinlein, and that's probably a good thing. Rather than weird vision enhancements and Swiss-Army-knife robot arms, maybe we'll get implants to dial up the right tune to calm psoriasis, dilate blood vessels, or recover from heart surgery.

A related story on the same site points the way: turns out that the perfect tune for timing CPR compressions is the BeeGee's "Stayin' Alive." The possibilities for a personal health playlist seem endless, and surely one's gut instinct, the same one that tells us that music's power is obvious, can point the way. I don't know why, exactly, but it seems like Cream's "White Room" would probably aid constipation. Need a good dose of sedation? Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."

So it's probably more of a rocket-science thing than that, but taking musical-medical matters into one's hands certainly seems to offer promise. It may even provide an alternative to single-payer healthcare if the Congress doesn't come through. We could put Bono in charge—much as I like him, he seems to nearly be a politician already. (On the other hand, hearing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" during surgery might not be the most comforting idea.)

Kidding aside, research seems to point toward the efficacy of the harp in particular, with its unfettered vibrations of many strings. That kind of ancient tug at the heart strings, like the warmth of cello or the timeless drone of didgeridoo, makes sense as a helpful regulator of health, and connecting the ancient to the contemporary ought to make future medicine a lot more pleasant.