Brain Recovery

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Recovery of cognitive functions after brain damage is a crucial concern, but is also a difficult topic to explore through research experiments, mainly due to ethical concerns. As such, numerous research on the effects of environmental stimuli on brain plasticity had been carried out on animal subjects, which have indicated that an enriched auditory environment not only enhances auditory functioning, but also enhances general learning and memory systems (Särkämö et al., 2010). Särkämö et al. (2010) aimed to examine the effects of auditory stimuli on human brain recovery by measuring the activity of MMN, a brain region that responds to changes in auditory stimuli even without conscious awareness, and thus is a well-known index of studying auditory …show more content…
(2010) recruited 60 MCA stroke patients (of which, 54 completed the study) from the Department of Neurology of the Helsinki University Central Hospital. Those recruited were all ≤75 years of age, Finnish-speaking, right-handed, with no hearing deficit, and no previous psychiatric or neurological disease. A researcher uninvolved in enrollment of patients randomly assigned all the subjects into one of three groups: a music group, an audiobook group, or the control group. The two experimental groups were instructed to listen to their assigned material for a minimum of one hour per day for the next two months (their participation was verified via listening diaries), while the control group was not presented with any listening material. Questionnaires were completed by all participants during the first week and at the end of six months to examine patients’ leisure activities and to verify their participation in the experiment. One week (baseline), three months, and six months after the stroke, MMN and neuropsychological testing were executed. MMN responses to changes in frequency and duration of audio tones were measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and neuropsychological tests consisted of story recall and word list learning tasks for assessing verbal memory, and Stroop subtests (from CogniSpeed© software) and mental subtractions for assessing focused attention (Särkämö et al., …show more content…
These increases in MMN responses in both the experimental groups also correlated with improved performance on story recall and mental subtraction tests as compared to the control group. Särkämö et al. (2010) suspected that the reason performance on story recall and mental subtractions were improved while Stroop subtests and word list learning tasks weren’t, was because the former tests revolved around utilization of working memory and speech comprehension, of which both are associated with auditory sensory
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