New British Studies Show-Music May Help Restore Vision After Strokes

New British Studies Show-Music May Help Restore Vision After Strokes and through this research,  British researchers say stroke patients may help restore their lost vision by listening to music that they liked or that was pleasant.

The Imperial College in London found this amazing fact when they 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, rather than listen to music they did not like or plain silence.

From the three patients, one of the three patients recognized 65 percent more, while listening to music he liked. That percentage dropped to 15 percent when he was listening to music he did not like or there was silence.

To prove their theory, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging scans, which showed listening to pleasant music as the patients performed the visual tasks activated the brain in areas linked to positive emotional responses to stimuli. This showed that when the brain was activated by music, the activation in emotion brain regions was coupled with the improvement of the patients’ awareness of the visual world.

The lead author Dr Davis Soto stated, “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.”

Last century researchers found hat flowers grow better with music and cows gave more milk that listened to music. Why did it take so long to apply it to humans? Would this study also mean that music improves memory???

So Baby Boomers, listening to those “Oldies but Goodies,” that we enjoy so much is a good thing. Think I will go turn on some Beatles music.

The findings are published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, under “Pleasant Music Overcomes The Loss of Awareness in Patients With Visual Neglect”.

New British Studies Show-Music May Help Restore Vision After Strokes, is a great break through. During the past 20 years there has been lots of research into the factors that modulate awareness of contralesional information in neurological patients with visual neglect or extinction. Hopefully, this new article, will open up other avenues.