Experts from the University of Helsinki arrived at their conclusion by means of an experiment involving 60 patients aged 75 or younger, who were currently in the recovery phase from either a left or right hemisphere cerebral artery stroke.
The subjects were divided into three groups depending on how how they spent the first week after their stroke, identified as the ideal recovery period: listening to music, listening to audiobooks, or doing nothing.
They were checked and tested after three months, and then after six months.
Teppo Sarkamo, PhD, the study co-author, recounted how after three months, the patients' verbal capacity showed a 60 percent improvement for those who listened to music, 18 percent for those who listened to books, and 29 percent for those who did not listen to either one.
"Similarly, focused attention - the ability to control and perform mental operations and resolve conflicts among responses - improved by 17 per cent in music listeners," Sarkamo told the Times, "but no improvement was observed in audio book listeners and nonlisteners. These differences were still essentially the same six months after the stroke."
According to MedPage Today, the experts surmised that, as the songs had lyrics, making them in some way similar to audiobooks in the presence of words, it must have been either the music itself, or the combination of voice and music, that aided in the better recovery of the patients.
They noted, however, that the results need to be backed up by further research, as there is still the need to explain the potential benefits of music to brain recovery.
The study was published in an issue of Brain.
