WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791). Austrian composer
New study revives a Mozart sonata as a potential epilepsy therapy
Could this be the return
of the “Mozart effect”?
In 1993, researchers
reported that after college students listened to a particular Mozart piano
sonata for 10 minutes, they showed better spatial reasoning skills than they
did after listening to relaxation instructions designed to lower blood pressure
— or to nothing at all. And their IQ scores jumped by 8 or 9 points in what
became known as the Mozart effect. Even though the benefits were hard to
reproduce (and wore off within minutes), the fad of Mozart for babies’ brain
development was born.
In that early research,
scientists also said listening to Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major”
(K448), helped patients with epilepsy by reducing spikes in neuron activity
that can lead to seizures. Again, the results were not consistent enough for
other scientists to replicate them. But now, 28 years later, newer methods are
reviving the possibility that music can be the calm that prevents the brain’s
electrical storm.
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Research published
Thursday in Scientific Reports says listening to the sonata for at least 30
seconds may be associated with less frequent spikes of certain electrical
activity in the brains of people whose epilepsy does not respond to medication.
In the study’s 16 patients, spikes fell by two-thirds throughout the brain, but
they dropped the most in the brain’s left and right frontal cortices, where
emotional responses are regulated.
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Study participants
listened to this clip from Mozart’s “Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major” (K448).
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Robert Quon, a graduate
student at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and lead author of the study,
talked with STAT about his lab’s initial skepticism, the tools that allow for
better measurement of brain activity, and just what it might be about this
piece of music (and not Judas Priest or Buddy Holly) that could prove helpful
to people with epilepsy. This interview has been edited and condensed for
clarity.
What led you to reexamine
the Mozart effect?
When I first joined
Barbara Jobst’s lab, I was fortunate to work with a postdoc in the lab, Grace
Leslie, who was conducting a study looking at how these different auditory tones
— not music, but more pure tones and frequencies — affected the brain waves.
The first study we performed was looking at how 40 hertz or this gamma
stimulation affected these interictal brain waves — brief events that occur
sporadically between seizures — in patients with epilepsy. It sounds
essentially just like a buzzing in the speaker.
What is it about these
spikes?
Increased numbers of these
spikes are correlated with memory loss or reduced cognitive outcomes, and even
increased seizure frequency. Therapies that can maybe reduce these spikes could
have some proven benefits to patients with epilepsy.
Why did you switch to
music?
I was testing patients in
that first experiment for only 15 seconds at a time, but even with just those
repeated 15 seconds of that gamma tone, a lot of the patients complained that
it wasn’t too nice to listen to.
Did you think it would
work?
Our group definitely
approached this with a very healthy skepticism. And we still are skeptical. A
lot of questions have emerged from this paper, but we’re hoping to answer more
of them over the years.
How did you determine the
music’s effect on brain activity, and how does it compare to methods of the
1990s?
Robert Quon
Robert Quon, lead study
author and a graduate student at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
COURTESY KELLYE OISHI
A lot of those studies
were using a scalp EEG [electroencephalogram], and that led to a lot of
contradictory findings. Signals generated by the cells that are firing in the
brain have to travel across a lot of layers, including bone, and a lot of the
signal gets damaged or even lost. The group of patients that we tested actually
have electrodes placed directly onto their brain surfaces rather than on top of
their scalp. They might be considered for surgical resection, so before doing a
surgical resection, intracranial electrodes are implanted in the patients to
localize where exactly the seizures are coming from so they can cut out the
brain region that might be generating these seizure events to hopefully lead to
seizure freedom.
That provided us with an
optimal window into the brain, enabling us to test the hypothesis that Mozart
may or may not reduce these intractable spikes.
Did you try other music?
We played essentially nine
different musical stimuli. One of them was Mozart. And then we also modulated
Mozart with that gamma tone, like an envelope of sorts. We tested music from
different genres and then patients selected the song that they liked the most.
Your paper lists Wagner’s
wedding march, but also Buddy Holly, Judas Priest, and Nickelback. What
happened?
We were really hoping that
one of these preferred pieces, when we modulated the frequencies, would result
in significant therapeutic effects. But unfortunately only the original Mozart
composition showed significant response. So that led us to investigate further
what properties might be responsible for this.
What is it about this
piece of music?
When people develop these
expectations about a musical piece and when the expectations are suddenly
violated — you have the same beat or tempo going on in the song and then a
sudden violation to that expectation in your brain — that’s linked with
positive emotional responses. We used a machine learning technique and a music
information retrieval technique to break this song into segments. And we
predicted that transitions out of these longer segments would be correlated with
enhanced power in the emotion networks of the brain. And that’s exactly what we
found with our analysis.
What’s next?
We want to look at how
different elements within the music itself and see how important they are for
eliciting these effects. Our next step would be to test whether we could detect
other musical stimuli with these preexisting properties, like tempo or timbre,
or add these properties through signal alteration. We’ll eventually, hopefully,
be able to define an anti-epileptic genre so maybe listening to music from this
playlist will reduce chances of having a seizure.
There’s a lot of time
needed to test these theories and to tease apart exactly what is important. And
we could definitely use machine learning to help us do that. Then after we do
that, we can even use machine learning to look for these features within just
large Spotify playlists of sorts and test that later.
We have a lot more
questions than we have answers from our study. But, you know, that’s kind of
common to most of research, right? I think the biggest take-home is that we
just want to replicate this in a larger group of subjects for a prolonged
period of time to really prove to ourselves that this is happening.
You must hear that sonata
a lot.
I listen to it quite
often. I’m in the room with the patient, so I hear it every time I’m testing
it. And other than that, I’m analyzing the structure of the musical signals
from a computational point of view. I’m pretty familiar with it.
About the AuthorReprints
Elizabeth Cooney
Elizabeth Cooney
Reporter, Morning Rounds
Writer
Liz Cooney is the author
of STAT's Morning Rounds newsletter.
elizabeth.cooney@statnews.com
@cooney_liz
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