Music can ‘reach’ children with severe brain damage

Music could be a way of communicating with children who have been severely brain damaged.

Music therapy could be used to assess the consciousness levels of these children, say researchers from Anglia Ruskin University.

A team from the university have developed MuSICCA (Music therapy Sensory Instrument for Cognition, Consciousness and Awareness), a technique that uses musical stimulation to help the patient demonstrate how conscious he is.

The music is specially selected for the patient and a therapist performs it while manipulating different elements of the score depending on how the patient responds. The idea is to give the patient the best chance of showing what they can do.

The music therapist observes the child’s behaviours and records these observations against a set of performance measures

“MuSICCA allows the music therapist to conduct a rigorous assessment of the patient’s response to various musical stimuli, giving the therapist a picture of the patient’s level of consciousness and the strengths and weaknesses of their responses. The information is easy to communicate to the rest of the care and medical teams and can support families in understanding what they can do to support their child’s recovery,” said Jonathan Pool, one of the researchers.

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