New research revives Mozart Sonata as a potential epilepsy treatment

NSIs this a revival of the “Mozart effect”?

1993, researcher report After listening to a particular Mozart piano sonata for 10 minutes, college students showed or never heard better spatial reasoning skills than after hearing relaxation instructions designed to lower blood pressure. And their IQ score is Mozart effect.. Although the effect was difficult to reproduce (and disappeared within minutes), a Mozart epidemic was born for the development of the baby’s brain.

In that early study, scientists helped epilepsy patients by listening to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos (K448), reducing spikes in neuronal activity that could lead to seizures. It also states. Again, the results were not consistent enough for other scientists to duplicate them. But now, 28 years later, new methods are resurrecting the potential for music to be a gentle one to prevent thunderstorms in the brain.

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research As announced in Scientific Reports on Thursday, listening to sonatas for at least 30 seconds can reduce the frequency of spikes in certain electrical activity in the brains of people whose epilepsy does not respond to medication. In 16 patients in this study, spikes were reduced by two-thirds throughout the brain, but most in the left and right frontal cortex of the brain, where emotional responses were regulated.

Research participants listened to this clip from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos (K448).

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Robert Kuon, a graduate student at Dartmouth School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said that his lab’s first skepticism, a tool that enables better measurements of brain activity, and that of this work. Talked to STAT about what it is Useful music for people with epilepsy (not Judas Priest or Buddy Holly). This interview has been edited and summarized for clarity.

what Did you lead us to revisit the Mozart effect?

When I first joined Barbara Jobst’s lab, I was fortunate to collaborate with the lab postdoc Grace Leslie. He was investigating how these different auditory sounds (pure sounds and frequencies, not music) affect brain waves. .. The first study we conducted examined how 40 hertz or this gamma stimulation affects interictal brain waves (short events that occur sporadically during seizures) in patients with epilepsy. .. It sounds essentially like a speaker buzzing.

What about these spikes?

An increase in the number of these spikes correlates with memory loss or diminished cognitive outcomes, as well as increased seizure frequency. Treatments that may be able to reduce these spikes may bring some proven benefits to patients with epilepsy.

Why did you switch to music?

I was testing patients for only 15 seconds at a time in that first experiment, and many patients complained that repeating the gamma tone for 15 seconds wasn’t very good to hear.

Did you think it would work?

Our group has undoubtedly tackled this with very sound skepticism. And we are still skeptical. Many questions have come up from this treatise, and we hope to answer many of them over the years.

How did you determine the impact of music on brain activity? And how does it compare to the 1990s method?

Many of those studies used scalp EEG [electroencephalogram], And that led to many contradictory discoveries. The signals produced by the cells firing in the brain need to pass through many layers, including bone, many of which are damaged or lost. The group of patients we tested actually placed the electrodes directly on the surface of the brain rather than on the scalp. Because they may be subject to surgical resection, prior to surgical resection, an intracranial electrode is implanted in the patient to pinpoint exactly where the seizures are coming from and these seizure events. Cut out the area of ​​the brain that may be producing, and hopefully seizure freedom.

It provided us with an optimal window to the brain and allowed Mozart to test the hypothesis that these unruly spikes may or may not be reduced.

Have you tried other music?

We played essentially nine different musical stimuli. One of them was Mozart. And, like some kind of envelope, I modulated Mozart with that gamma tone. After testing different genres of music, patients chose their favorite song.

Your treatise lists not only Wagner’s wedding procession, but also Buddy Holly, Judas Priest, and Nickelback. What’s wrong?

We really wanted one of these favorable parts to have a significant therapeutic effect when the frequency was modulated. Unfortunately, only the original Mozart composition responded significantly. So we decided to investigate further which properties were involved in this.

What about this song?

When people have these expectations about a song and that expectation is suddenly violated — when the same beat or tempo progresses in the song and then suddenly violates that expectation in the brain — it’s a positive emotional reaction. Is related to. We used machine learning technology and music information retrieval technology to divide this song into segments. He predicted that transitions from these longer segments would correlate with enhanced forces in the brain’s emotional network. And that’s exactly what we found in our analysis.

What’s next?

I would like to examine the various elements of the music itself and see how important they are to bring out these effects. The next step is to test whether these existing properties, such as tempo and timbre, can be used to detect other musical stimuli, or whether these properties can be added through signal changes. Eventually, you will be able to define the genre of antiepileptic drugs, and listening to the music in this playlist will reduce your chances of having a seizure.

There is a lot of time needed to test these theories and accurately distinguish what is important. And we can definitely do that using machine learning. You can then use machine learning to look for these features in some big Spotify playlists and test them later.

There are far more questions than the answers from our study. But that’s what most studies have in common, right? I think the biggest takeaway is that you want to replicate this to a larger group of subjects for a long time to actually prove that this is happening.

You need to hear a lot of that sonata.

I listen to it often. I’m in the room with the patient, so I hear it every time I test it. Other than that, the structure of the music signal is analyzed from the viewpoint of calculation. I know it pretty well.