News
Music Helps
Brain Injured patients having difficulty with attention span may benefit from listening to some of their favorite tunes, reports MedPage Today. A recent study conducted by David Soto, M.D. or Imperial College London and colleagues found that “patients have better visual awareness when completing tasks while listening to music of their choice compared with unpreferred music or silence.” The researchers said that using music was affective even in chronic patients, and that “positive emotional responses and optimum arousal induced by pleasant music listening may aid the engagement of the neuroplastic systems that support flexible attention control.” Medpage Today reports:
“We speculate that pleasant music may lead to optimal, rather than maximal, levels of arousal, and this can reduce neglect, whereas unpreferred music may increase extinction by over arousing patients,” the researchers said.
The study also found consistent evidence for the effects of positive emotion. One of the three patients had a higher positive effect response relative to the other patients, suggesting that the “strength of the positive effect response may modulate improvements in visual neglect.”
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