Michael Thaut is the director of the Collaboratory. He demonstrated some of the ways music can be used in rehabilitation, for instance in a patient with aphasia, a condition that causes problems with speech, often due to a stroke. He showed how a patient was able to sing words that he was otherwise unable to say.

Michael Thaut discusses the use of music in rehabilitation for people with neurological problems. (Jeremy Sale) "The mechanism is that the left side of his brain - that pathway - is destroyed because of the stroke," Thaut explains "but when we sing then we can transfer the speech network to the right side of the brain, and that's the healthy side." With repeated training over weeks, people can start to speak without having to sing the words.