Science

Music Therapy Might Help People With Epilepsy

About 80 percent of epilepsy patients have temporal lobe epilepsy, in which seizures originate in the temporal lobe of the brain. Music is processed in the auditory cortex, located in the same region of the brain. The study authors said that the brains of epilepsy patients appear to react to music differently from the brains of people without the disorder.

The researchers looked at how different types of music and silence were processed in the brains of 21 people with epilepsy. Whether listening to classical music or jazz, all of the participants had much higher levels of brain wave activity when listening to music, the study found.

Brain wave activity in the epilepsy patients tended to synchronize more with the music, especially in the temporal lobe, the researchers said.

Music therapy wouldn´t replace current epilepsy treatments, but might offer a new method to use in conjunction with traditional approaches to help prevent seizures.