Headphone boost (Image: Flatliner/Photodisc/Getty Images)

Listening to a favourite song might boost the brain’s ability to respond to other stimuli in people with disorders of consciousness.

Music has been shown to have a beneficial influence on cognitive process in healthy people and those who have brain damage. For example, daily music therapy can help to enhance cognitive recovery after a stroke.

Fabien Perrin at the University of Lyon, France, and colleagues recorded brain activity in four patients – two in a coma, one in a minimally conscious state, and one in a vegetative state – while they were read a list of people’s names, including the subject’s own name. The list was preceded either by the subject’s favourite music – chosen by family and friends – or by “musical noise”. One patient listened to The Eagles’ Hotel California, another was played the Blues Brothers’ Everybody Needs Somebody to Love. The team then repeated the experiment with ten healthy volunteers.

In all four patients, playing the music rather than musical noise enhanced the quality of the brain’s subsequent response to their own name, bringing it closer to the brain response of the ten healthy volunteers to hearing their own name, whether or not it was preceded by music or musical noise. The work was presented at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Brighton, UK, last month.


Consciousness increase

Perrin has two theories about what’s going on. “Listening to preferred music activates our autobiographical memory – so it could make it easier for the subsequent perception of another autobiographical stimulus such as your name,” he says. “Another hypothesis is that music enhances arousal or awareness, so maybe it temporarily increases consciousness and the discrimination of your name becomes easier.”

“The familiar music might be causing an emotional arousal effect, and once [the patient with brain damage is] aroused, there is a small window that opens for increased communication and the brain responds to the name,” suggests Carsten Finke, a neurologist at Charité Medical School in Berlin, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

So is Perrin’s music sparking some form of consciousness in the people with brain damage? “I’ve not come across any responses like this to music before and it’s way too early to conclude that it has any therapeutic effects in these patients,” says Adrian Owen at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.

Perrin agrees that it’s very early days. “We’re showing that we can boost cerebral activity to obtain responses that are very similar to those obtained from healthy participants. It’s in favour of enhancement of self-consciousness but we can’t be sure.”

But he says that confirming the results with more people could have direct implications on the sensory environment of patients in intensive care.