Humans seem to be programmed to have a deep need to hear the voice of someone we love, even if we don’t consciously know that.
A voice can be healing, not just in a symbolic ways, but a literal way, too. At Northwestern University, psychologist Theresa Pape experimented with patients in comas. She split coma patients into two groups which were similar in their degree of seriousness. Each person is the test group had the voice of someone he or she loved played repeatedly in his or her hospital room. The control group received only routine treatment.
Pape found that the patients who heard the voice of a loved one came out of the coma more quickly than the very similar patients in the other group. Something about the voice of love helped bring them back to conscious life.
I’m thinking about this tonight because of a recording I stumbled upon. There was nothing momentous about what she said. She wasn’t even talking about love or the sort of thing we like to remember about such relationships.
But her voice reached across time and space and pierced my heart.
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
Economic Man needs no heart, because love and God are dead