Singing Helps People Recover from Stroke

A new investigation has demonstrated that singing may be helping stroke patients recover some use of their brain when it comes to communicating with others. Experts say that the speech center of the human brain is separate from the area dealing with singing, and that, therefore, patients who lost the former can boost their communication ability by employing the other. In other words, the study has found, it may be that teaching stroke patients how to sing basically rewires their brain in a way that allows them to more easily connect with others, the BBC News reports.

The new approach, called “melodic intonation therapy,” is currently undergoing scientific trials, experts have recently announced in San Diego, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The research is led by Harvard Medical School (HMS) expert Gottfried Schlaug, who is also a neurology professor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. This approach to handling stroke patients was discovered some time ago, when investigators were first able to determine that the patients whose speech had been impaired could still sing a tune.

What Schlaug's team did was basically combine this knowledge with a brain-imaging technique. This allowed the team to watch what was happening in the brain in real time, as the patients sang. Neuroscientists have known for some time that the areas of the brain that control movement and hearing are located on the left side of the cortex. “But there's a sort of corresponding hole on the right side. 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],” the expert says.

The new investigation has essentially revealed that patients who learn how to sing rather than talk exhibit new connections forming on the right side of their brains, enabling them to communicate. The left side of the brain is bypassed when stroke patients sing, researchers say. “People sometimes ask where in the brain music is processed and the answer is everywhere above the neck. Music engages huge swathes of the brain – it's not just lighting up a spot in the auditory cortex,” Neurosciences Institute in San Diego expert, Dr. Aniruddh Patel, who has not been part of the investigation, says.