Sing And Ye Shall Be Healed

US research findings reveal teaching stroke patients to sing "rewires" their brains, helping them to recover their speech.

Just about every known religion promotes singing as healing for the soul and spirit. Now it seems the good folks down at the choir are righter than they know. Singing utilises a different area of the brain from the one involved with speech but this research has revealed that if a person's "speech centre" is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their "singing centre" instead. As reported at the BBC, researchers presented these findings at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego. Team leader Gottfried Schlaug, a neurology professor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, said an ongoing clinical trial has shown how the brain responds to this "melodic intonation therapy", already established as a medical technique. Researchers first used it when it was discovered that stroke patients with brain damage that left them unable to speak were still able to sing. Professor Schlaug explained his was the first study to combine this therapy with brain imaging - "to show what is actually going on in the brain" as patients learn to sing their words. Most of the connections between brain areas controlling movement and those that control hearing are on the left side of the brain. "But there's a sort of corresponding hole on the right side," said Professor Schlaug. "For some reason, it's not as endowed with these connections, so the left side is used much more in speech. "If you damage the left side, the right side has trouble fulfilling that role." But as patients learn to put their words to melodies, the crucial connections form on the right side of their brains. The formation of the connections can be easily seen; previous brain imaging studies have shown that this "singing centre" is overdeveloped in the brains of professional singers. During the therapy sessions, patients are taught to put their words to simple melodies. Professor Schlaug said that after a single session, a stroke patient who was are not able to form any intelligible words learned to say the phrase "I am thirsty" by combining each syllable with the note of a melody. The patients are also encouraged to get on the beat by tapping out each syllable with their hands. Professor Schlaug said this seemed to act as an "internal pace-maker" making the therapy even more effective. "Music might be an alternative medium to engage parts of the brain that are otherwise not engaged," he said. Every parent with a guitar-playing child would heartily agree. Dr Aniruddh Patel from the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, said the study was an example of the "explosion in research into music and the brain" over the last decade. "People sometimes ask where in the brain music is processed and the answer is everywhere above the neck," said Dr Patel. "Music engages huge swathes of the brain - it's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex." Dr Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist from Northwestern University in Chicago, also studies the effects of music on the brain by recording the brain's response to music using electrodes on the scalp. This has enabled her to "play back" electrical activity from brain cells as they pick up and interpret sounds. "Neurons work with electricity - so if you record the electricity from the brain you can play that back through speakers and hear how the brain deals with sounds," she explained, an intriguing predictor of the future of electronic music. Dr Kraus has also discovered that musical training seems to enhance the ability to perform other tasks, such as reading. Such insights into how the brain responds to music are welcome news to the educator community’s assertion that musical training is an important part of a child’s overall education.