BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Music can help people recover from stroke

Dengl 18 BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: Music can help people recover from stroke
first - an abstract of a new study then, my comment:
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Given its power to move us, perhaps it's no surprise that a great deal of
research has focused on whether or not music can help people with depression
or anxiety. Now researchers in Finland have asked whether music can benefit
people recovering from stroke. Their study is notable for its sound
methodological quality, and the results are promising: music does indeed
appear to make a difference to patients' cognitive recovery.

Soon after their hospitalisation, 60 stroke patients were allocated randomly
to one of three groups. Those in the music group were provided with a
portable CD player and asked to listen to their favourite music for at least
an hour a day for two months. Patients in the audio book group spent at
least an hour a day for two months listening to audio books of their
choosing. A final control group were not given a listening task.

Compared to the patients who listened to audio books and the control
patients, the patients who listened to music daily showed superior
performance when tested three months and six months later on measures of
verbal memory and focused attention. Crucially, the psychologists who
performed these neuropsychological assessments were unaware of which groups
the patients had been in - making this a single-blind, randomised,
controlled trial. The music and audio book patients also showed reduced
depression and confusion compared with the control patients.

Teppo Sarkamo and colleagues who conducted the research said that music may
exert these benefits by virtue of its wide-ranging impact on brain activity.
Neuroimaging studies have shown that listening to music "naturally recruits
bilateral temporal, frontal and parietal neural circuits underlying multiple
forms of attention, working memory, semantic and syntactic processing, and
imagery," the researchers said. By contrast, the brain activity triggered by
speech without music is less extensive and more focused on the
language-dominant hemisphere (usually the left).

The new finding is consistent with research on animals showing that a
stimulating environment can speed recovery after stroke. Yet the researchers
noted with regret that many stroke patients are left in their rooms without
much stimulation or interaction. "We suggest that everyday music listening
during early stroke recovery offers a valuable addition to the patients'
care," they concluded.
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my comment:

I guess the patients were aged (at least) over 65, and that their preferred music was in the realm of classical or older popular music which was structurally similar to classical music (some slower tempi, some use of triple time)
It is important to specify what music these people did listen to - and even to an analyse, within the music-receiving group, who did best with what.Of course, the location of the stroke and the propensity to benefit from music will likely also be a part of the outcome. One may (sadly) forecast that as the decades march on, music preferences will be for rock-and-later popular music (less use of slower tempi, virtually no triple time). I tentatively forecast (hypothesise) that this will be less useful - regardless of the fact that it is familiar and preferred - in stroke recovery. I have written elsewhere why triple time is so important to more complex mentation (references on request).