Brain Health is a unique series focused on how to help you age well. These stories have been created in cooperation with AARP and Word In Black.
It’s an ancient, global practice that has endured over centuries, but tutorials can be found on YouTube. It can involve singing bowls, gongs, and even a didgeridoo, but no music is made. It has the word “bath” in its name, but doesn’t involve a drop of water.
It can seem like a paradox, but the practice of sound baths — immersing oneself in an atmosphere of gentle, resonant sound, producing a deeply relaxed or meditative state — is growing in popularity. Research shows they can have a beneficial effect on the mind, relieving stress and boosting emotional well-being.
“It’s just being bathed in frequencies,” says Wanjira Makena, a sound bath practitioner. “Just being surrounded by musical harmonies and waves and beats. These frequencies are actual physical things that go through our bodies and affect our bodies and rearrange things within us to bring harmony back to the human body.”
Dr. Suzanne B. Hanser is a music therapist and member of AARP’s Global Council on Brain Health (GCBH). She has devised music treatment plans for people in medical settings for heart disease, cancer, childbirth and Alzheimer’s disease. Though there is little scientific evidence of whether sound immersion can slow cognitive decline, Hanser says a connection to music in general can have a lasting effect on cognition.
“We can forge new neuropathways throughout the brain by interacting with music in its many capacities,” she says. “So many areas of the brain are activated with music and we can strengthen functions, like sensory-motor, emotional expression, and creative, meaning-making abilities.”
At the same time, “music is widely available and accessible, offering diverse genres, pleasurable and motivating activities, and social connection,” Hansen says.
There is evidence that sound baths can bring practitioners into a meditative state and promote an overall sense of wellbeing; both are good for the brain. A 2022 observational study found that sound meditation involving singing bowls and gongs relieved physical pain and tension. Another study found that a sound bath could help ease anxiety ahead of surgery — for caregivers as well as patients.
Makena, the sound bath practitioner, created the Detroit Sound Immersion Meditation Project, a meditative practice for people at all levels of experience. The project has collaborated with yoga instructors, playing tones and sounds that correspond with energy centers within the body.
“I have had folks come into sessions who are suffering from multiple sclerosis – other types of neurodegenerative disease,” Makena says. “And I’ve literally had people say to me that during the sound immersion that the weak part of their body that they cannot move usually is being energized and is kind of moving and coming back to life almost.”
There are several ways to participate in a sound immersion session. As sound waves wash over you, Makena says, try meditating with “focused, intentional thought” in each moment.
“If you’re practicing focusing your attention and keeping your mind present, this is sort of like exercising a muscle in the brain that helps to counteract those age-related decline that we might experience,” she says. “That, in turn, can enhance memory, and it can help with recall and all that good stuff.”
Perhaps the biggest benefit of sound immersion is helping practitioners regulate their emotions.
“We go through a really stressful existence here in America and all over the world,” says Makena. “There are so many other holistic tools that we can use to improve our well being and given that we go through such a stressful existence at times, we should have all the tools in our toolbelt that we could possibly use.”
For additional resources, go to AARP’s Global Council on Brain Health Music and Brain Health information center.