Music may help restore vision after stroke
Posted on: Tuesday, 24 March 2009, 16:58 CDT
British researchers say stroke patients may help restore their lost vision by listening to music they like.
Researchers at the Imperial College London looked at three patients who had lost awareness of half of their field of vision as a result of a stroke. All three patients could identify shapes and lights in their depleted side of vision much more accurately while they were listening to music they liked than listening to music they did not like or silence.
One patient's recognition score of 65 percent while listening to music he liked dropped to 15 percent when there was music he did not like or there was no music.
Also, functional magnetic resonance imaging scans showed listening to pleasant music as the patients performed the visual tasks activated the brain in areas linked to positive emotional responses to stimuli. When the brain was activated in this way, the activation in emotion brain regions was coupled with the improvement of the patients' awareness of the visual world.
Music appears to improve awareness because of its positive emotional effect on the patient, so similar beneficial effects may also be gained by making the patient happy in other ways,
lead author Dr. David Soto says in a statement.
The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: United Press International
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