Forty sessions of music gave him his voice back

A 2023 stroke left Naresh Shanbhag, a 53-year-old sales professional in Bengaluru, unable to form words or sentences, despite a career built on talking. A doctor friend suggested music therapy. He was skeptical that listening to songs could rebuild his speech. "From the very first session, I was hooked," he says. At India's first music cognition lab, run by neuropsychology professor and trained classical vocalist Shantala Hegde at NIMHANS, Shanbhag started by tapping single beats on a smartphone app. When his therapist noticed he could sing more fluently than he could speak, the exercises became sentences set to melody. The science rests on neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to rewire undamaged regions around injured tissue. A year and 40 sessions later, Shanbhag walks better, speaks in coherent sentences, and runs an Instagram page for his music videos. Every morning he fetches milk and groceries, his shopping list belted out as a song. The lab charges just over 42 dollars for 20 sessions.