After suffering a brain hemorrhage, 7-year-old Charlotte Neve slipped into a coma. The British girl was unconscious for several days and doctors feared she wouldn\u2019t recover. Her mother, Leila Neve, was at her bedside when Adele\u2019s \u201cRolling in the Deep\u201d started playing on the radio. Leila and Charlotte often sang the song together and Leila began singing along.<\/p>\n
Then something remarkable happened: Charlotte smiled. Within two days, she could speak and get out of bed. Why does music seem to help “awaken” some people from their comas?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a salient stimulus, something that she is familiar with, like [her] name,\u201d says Dr. Emery Neal Brown, professor of anesthesia at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and professor of computational neuroscience at MIT.<\/p>\n
Brown suspects Charlotte recovered some brain functioning prior to hearing the Adele song, but it was imperceptible. When she heard the song, she smiled and eventually woke because it held meaning for her (that’s the salient stimulus part).<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe people have function recovered and we don\u2019t know how to communicate with them,\u201d he says, explaining a salient stimulus varies by person.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever memories have an emotional context to them, they tend to hold much more power in the brain and tend to be processed differently,\u201d says Dr. Javier Provencio, director of the Neurological Critical Care Unit at Cleveland Clinic.<\/p>\n
Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees woke from his coma when his family played music for him \u2014 music for a professional musician who sang with his brothers would have deep meaningful connections in the brain, sparking a reaction. But for someone who plays tennis or rides horses, a song might not encourage a response.<\/p>\n
But sometimes, music causes a reaction because the brain processes songs differently than spoken language. In these cases, the region of the brain responsible for song might be working better while the language lags behind<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe people have function recovered and we don\u2019t know how to communicate with them,\u201d he says, explaining a salient stimulus varies by person.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhenever memories have an emotional context to them, they tend to hold much more power in the brain and tend to be processed differently,\u201d says Dr. Javier Provencio, director of the Neurological Critical Care Unit at Cleveland Clinic.<\/p>\n
Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees woke from his coma when his family played music for him \u2014 music for a professional musician who sang with his brothers would have deep meaningful connections in the brain, sparking a reaction. But for someone who plays tennis or rides horses, a song might not encourage a response.<\/p>\n
But sometimes, music causes a reaction because the brain processes songs differently than spoken language. In these cases, the region of the brain responsible for song might be working better while the language lags behind.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe clearly process music and tonal things differently than language. There are patients [who had strokes] who cannot talk but can still sing,\u201d says Provencio.<\/p>\n
The left cerebral hemisphere controls language, while the right processes song and music. Patients who have damage in the left might respond better to song.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey lose the ability to talk and understand. Music therapy is really useful because it is used in the non-dominate hemisphere,\u201d says Dr. James Bernat, professor of neurology and medicine at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.<\/p>\n
Music therapists such as Lee Anna Rasar at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire often use music to try to evoke responses from comatose patients. She notes that songs are most effective \u201cif the music is something they knew before that already had meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the physicians agree that doctors still have limited understanding of whether someone will recover from a coma, but if Charlotte wasn\u2019t already healing, she wouldn\u2019t have smiled at the song.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven in a coma, it\u2019s quite common that these people improve spontaneously,\u201d says Bernat. \u201cThey wake up and start responding. It isn\u2019t outside the range of what is expected that there would be improvement over time.\u201d<\/p>\n
By Meghan Holohan MSNBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After suffering a brain hemorrhage, 7-year-old Charlotte Neve slipped into a coma. The British girl was unconscious for several days and doctors feared she wouldn\u2019t recover. Her mother, Leila Neve, was at her bedside when Adele\u2019s \u201cRolling in the Deep\u201d started playing on the radio. Leila and Charlotte often sang the song together and Leila […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[374,334,1,208],"tags":[375,147],"yoast_head":"\n