Music has been found to be perceived differently by people who have epilepsy than normal ones according to a research at Wexner Medical Center in Ohio State University by Christine Charyton, PhD.
Charyton and her teammates expressed that, "We believe that music could be potentially be used as an intervention to help people with epilepsy."
They report that among epileptics included in the study, 80 percent of them had attacks that were triggered in the temporal lobe, where the sense of hearing is processed. This abnormality is identified as temporal lobe epilepsy.
The auditory cortex of the lobe houses the interpretation of the nerve impulses, which carry sound information. Because of this fact, the study was initiated to investigate the relationship between music and the epileptics' brain.
An electroencephalogram was employed to rate the philharmonic processing performance of people's brain, which are thought to be impaired with this disease and those which are not. Detection were accompanied by the electrodes, which are placed on the persons' scalp, of the measuring device. The transcribed brainwave patterns are then analyzed and compared to distinguish difference among the test subjects from two cases.
Through September 2012 to May 2014, in the epilepsy monitoring unit, 21 individuals were tried and sourced for data collection.
During the observation, one classical music among Andante Movement II (K448), Sonata in Major D of Mozart and My Favorite Things by John Coltrane were played to let patients hear which were following an introduction of silence for 10 minutes. Another silence with the same duration was allowed, then the remaining pieces were played and the final 10-minute silence were done to have triggered changes in brainwave patterns.
According to the researchers, synchronization of the temporal lobe's behavior along with the music were more determined in patients with epilepsy. The relation was found to be of less significance in people without such disorder.
The researchers, astonished by the result, hypothesized before that music and silence would be perceived differently by the brain and have proven so. What was left uncertain to them back then was the condition if the case would vary between epileptics and the normal people.
