Learning with Music Helps Boost Changes in Brain Structure.

I have understood the importance of music for some time now, how it can influence the plasticity of the brain and how in particular it can influence the development of spoken language.  This is why there is a musical element to all Snowdrop Programmes, whether that be through offering clients access to the 'EASE' programme, the 'Listening Programme,' or whether it is using music to calm a child.  Now we have evidence that we can use music to stimulate better motor performance.  This will be immediately implemented and incorporated into our programmes.  With thanks to domain-b.com.  Learning with Music Helps Boost Changes in Brain Structure 

4th Assessment for a Little Girl with Cerebral Palsy through Bilateral Haemorrage.

Today we welcomed back a 4 year old little girl and her family today for her 4th assessment. She had suffered a bilateral haemorrhage, leading to cerebral palsy.  She had suffered the bleeds shortly after birth and the doctors had told mum and dad that 'if she survived' and they did not expect her to, she did not have a bright future and would most likely have severe disabilities.  However, she is doing very well indeed. 

At four years of age she is now top of the developmental ladder in visual development being able to read via both sight recognition and through phonological building of a word from it's constituent graphemes / phonemes.  Auditory development which was plagued by sensitivity around 2.6 Khz is now also at the top of the developmental profile.  The sensitivity issue is important because although human hearing goes right up to 20,000 Hz, the 43 speech sounds of the English sound system are compressed within a frequency range of 450Hz - 4,500Hz.  A sensitivity at 2, 500HZ, which is right in the middle of speech sound frequencies is likely to cause problems in processing speech sounds and therefore in producing those speech sounds in the form of language.  The sensitivity has been dealt with by the activities of the Snowdrop programme and she now understands language in advance of her age and produces perfect, grammatically correct language.

Yes she has some problems with visual acuity but when there is also a retinal bleed that is almost inevitable. Gross motor development has progressed from 18 months to the 36 month level, which considering she has been on programme for 16 months, is phenomenal progress, although we have to work on quality of movement. A very intelligent little girl here, who will go a long way!

I Can See and Hear.

This morning was the 4th assessment of a little girl whose diagnosis is 'spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy.' 'cortical visual impairment' and 'bilateral severe/moderate hearing loss.' When we first saw her she was 2.5 years old and in the 18 months she has been on the Snowdrop programme, she has moved to the top of the developmental profile in both visual and auditory development. Such a lovely, intelligent little girl.

The link between music and language development.

This is the reason why exposure to music is a primary factor within the Snowdrop programme for brain injured children.  With thanks to 'Medical News Today.'

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Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language. 

"Spoken language is a special type of music," said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. "Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music." 

Brandt, associate professor of composition and theory at the Shepherd School, co-authored the paper with Shepherd School graduate student Molly Gebrian and L. Robert Slevc, UMCP assistant professor of psychology and director of the Language and Music Cognition Lab. 

"Infants listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning," Brandt said. He noted that newborns' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception depend on the discrimination of the sounds of language - "the most musical aspects of speech." 

The paper cites various studies that show what the newborn brain is capable of, such as the ability to distinguish the phonemes, or basic distinctive units of speech sound, and such attributes as pitch, rhythm and timbre. 

The authors define music as "creative play with sound." They said the term "music" implies an attention to the acoustic features of sound irrespective of any referential function. As adults, people focus primarily on the meaning of speech. But babies begin by hearing language as "an intentional and often repetitive vocal performance," Brandt said. "They listen to it not only for its emotional content but also for its rhythmic and phonemic patterns and consistencies. The meaning of words comes later." 

Brandt and his co-authors challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language cognition and is more difficult. "We show that music and language develop along similar time lines," he said. 

Infants initially don't distinguish well between their native language and all the languages of the world, Brandt said. Throughout the first year of life, they gradually hone in on their native language. Similarly, infants initially don't distinguish well between their native musical traditions and those of other cultures; they start to hone in on their own musical culture at the same time that they hone in on their native language, he said. 

The paper explores many connections between listening to speech and music. For example, recognizing the sound of different consonants requires rapid processing in the temporal lobe of the brain. Similarly, recognizing the timbre of different instruments requires temporal processing at the same speed - a feature of musical hearing that has often been overlooked, Brandt said. 

"You can't distinguish between a piano and a trumpet if you can't process what you're hearing at the same speed that you listen for the difference between 'ba' and 'da,'" he said. "In this and many other ways, listening to music and speech overlap." The authors argue that from a musical perspective, speech is a concert of phonemes and syllables. 

"While music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults, we suggest that language is simply a subset of music from a child's view," Brandt said. "We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development." 

Brandt said more research on this topic might lead to a better understanding of why music therapy is helpful for people with reading and speech disorders. People with dyslexia often have problems with the performance of musical rhythm. "A lot of people with language deficits also have musical deficits," Brandt said. 

More research could also shed light on rehabilitation for people who have suffered a stroke. "Music helps them reacquire language, because that may be how they acquired language in the first place," Brandt said. 

Music and Language are Processed By Some of the Same Brain Systems

 
This is further justification for the use of music as a tool for treatment within the Snowdrop programme, both generally and using such tools as 'The Listening Programme' of which Snowdrop is a providor.

With thanks to MNT
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Researchers have long debated whether or not language and music depend on common processes in the mind. Now, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center have found evidence that the processing of music and language do indeed depend on some of the same brain systems. 

Their findings, which are currently available on-line and will be published later this year in the journal NeuroImage, are the first to suggest that two different aspects of both music and language depend on the same two memory systems in the brain. One brain system, based in the temporal lobes, helps humans memorize information in both language and music -- for example, words and meanings in language and familiar melodies in music. The other system, based in the frontal lobes, helps us unconsciously learn and use the rules that underlie both language and music, such as the rules of syntax in sentences, and the rules of harmony in music. 

"Up until now, researchers had found that the processing of rules relies on an overlapping set of frontal lobe structures in music and language. However, in addition to rules, both language and music crucially require the memorization of arbitrary information such as words and melodies," says the study's principal investigator, Michael Ullman, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience, psychology, neurology and linguistics. 

"This study not only confirms that one set of brain structures underlies rules in both language and music, but also suggests, for the first time, that a different brain system underlies memorized information in both domains," Ullman says. "So language and music both depend on two different brain systems, each for the same type of thing -- rules in one case, and arbitrary information in the other." 

Robbin Miranda, Ph.D., currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Neuroscience, carried out this research with Ullman for her graduate dissertation at Georgetown. They enrolled 64 adults. They used a technique called Event-Related Potentials, in which they measured the brain's electrical activity using electrodes placed on the scalp. 

The subjects listened to 180 snippets of melodies. Half of the melodies were segments from tunes that most participants would know, such as "Three Blind Mice" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." The other half included novel tunes composed by Miranda. Three versions of each well-known and novel melody were created: melodies containing an in-key deviant note (which could only be detected if the melody was familiar, and therefore memorized); melodies that contained an out-of-key deviant note (which violated rules of harmony); and the original (control) melodies. 

For listeners familiar with a melody, an in-key deviant note violated the listener's memory of the melody -- the song sounded musically "correct" and didn't violate any rules of music, but it was different than what the listener had previously memorized. In contrast, in-key "deviant" notes in novel melodies did not violate memory (or rules) because the listeners did not know the tune. 

Out-of-key deviant notes constituted violations of musical rules in both well-known and novel melodies. Additionally, out-of-key deviant notes violated memory in well-known melodies. 

Miranda and Ullman examined the brain waves of the participants who listened to melodies in the different conditions, and found that violations of rules and memory in music corresponded to the two patterns of brain waves seen in previous studies of rule and memory violations in language. That is, in-key violations of familiar (but not novel) melodies led to a brain-wave pattern similar to one called an "N400" that has previously been found with violations of words (such as, "I'll have my coffee with milk and concrete"). Out-of-key violations of both familiar and novel melodies led to a brain-wave pattern over frontal lobe electrodes similar to patterns previously found for violations of rules in both language and music. Finally, out-of-key violations of familiar melodies also led to an N400-like pattern of brain activity, as expected because these are violations of memory as well as rules. 

"This tells us that these two aspects of music, that is rules and memorized melodies, depend on two different brain systems -- brain systems that also underlie rules and memorized information in language," Ullman says. "The findings open up exciting new ways of thinking about and investigating the relationship between language and music, two fundamental human capacities."

David. A Case Study from the Snowdrop Programme.

David is a little boy who literally could not stop.  When I first saw him in the village hall just a year ago, he simply ran and ran until he was exhausted.  He was so overactive and unpredictable in his behaviour that mum and dad did not take him out much, simply because they couldn’t control him.  He also had terrific sensory processing problems.  If anyone sang, or clapped, or whistled, David would overreact wildly as if terrified or as if he was in pain.  In addition to this, upon examination, he was very oversensitive to tactile stimulation in all his limbs.  Also David never slept for more than an hour. At two and a half years of age, mum and dad were obviously keen to try to calm him down in preparation for entry to nursery.

On my first assessment of David, I spent most of the morning chasing him to try to pin him down long enough to perform various tests / observations, which isn’t an unusual situation in itself as I find myself in such a pursuit of various children, but David’s level of activity was bizarre.  Finally after much chasing and wrestling, my work was done and mum just looked at me and said, “what on earth can we do?”

The programme which I instituted was based upon the ‘opponent threshold theory’ – The research which supported this theory seemed to suggest that in some children in order to reduce the level of activity of a particular neurotransmitter system, it was necessary to stimulate that system beyond a certain threshold of activity.  The programme activities were designed to do precisely this.  The repetitions of those activities would serve as a basis for stimulating brain plasticity, - encouraging the brain to make new connections within this normal framework of activity.

Now mum and dad are the type of people who will readily admit that they go away and hibernate.  Although they still regularly see me to this day, they take the programme and go away never to be heard from for the next four months.  This is fine, the last thing I would wish to do is to impose myself upon anyone’s privacy.  So the next time I heard from them was four months later when they made the appointment for their reassessment.  I was a little dubious because I thought mum sounded a little cagey on the telephone and I was thinking that maybe very little progress had been made.

The Friday morning of their first reassessment arrived and I waited nervously for them to enter the village hall.  I was expecting to have to chase David down again and had joked with Janet, my wife that I had a lassoo in my bag.   I was overjoyed when David walked in holding his mum and dad’s hand.  Just looking at him you could tell he had lost that ‘frantic’ overactivity.  He came to the table, took a tesco bag of his mum and emptied his Mr Men books onto the table.  This child who four months earlier had not produced any language which I could recognise then proceeded to tell me the titles of the books.  He was making good eye – contact, paying appropriate attention to me and was just so much calmer.

Dad said that when they left after their initial assessment four months earlier, he had been sceptical about the programme and what benefit it would have, but that all of that scepticism melted away when they got home and after one particular activity David had just immediately calmed down.  He slept for several hours that first night for the first time in months and with the addition of a weighted blanket, was now sleeping consistently well.  His auditory processing problems had also dissipated to the point where mum no longer had to dive for the remote control to change channel every time there was singing on the TV.

David still has problems and I still see him to this day, but these problems are now minor compared to a year ago and we are steadily making inroads into them.  He now speaks in four word sentences, mum and dad can take him out and his learning abilities are progressing nicely now he isn’t being hindered by lack of sleep, an inability to attend and sensory processing problems which were simply preventing the correct environmental information from being processed in the brain.  David is heading in the right direction and will have no difficulty in being accepted into a mainstream nursery and school.