LONDON, Mar 24, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- 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.
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