SPIKE//

In other news: No, it doesn’t.  Ugh.  I came across this post a while back and had saved it as a draft, hoping to get a chance to read it sooner.  I thought it’d be about some new breakthrough, but no, it’s actually a reference to a decades-old therapy technique for patients with aphasia called Melodic Intonation Therapy, or MIT for short  (see Marshal and Holtzapple, 1976).

People with aphasia almost always have damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, and as a result have problems with all aspects of language processing.  The idea behind MIT is that music is processed in the spared right hemisphere.  Therefore, the right hemisphere could pick up language functions by training speech set to rhythmic, music-based patterns.

The problem is, there is basically no evidence that MIT works.  There have been only a handful of case studies that show any efficacy whatsoever, and any effect there was seen only on trained tasks  (e.g., if the therapist trained the patient to say the phrase “How are you”, then the patient did a great job on that, but couldn’t generalize the technique to have a full-fledged conversation).

More disappointing, some of the recent studies that included brain imaging have shown that MIT does recruit the right hemisphere, at the expense of lowering the activation of the left hemisphere, thereby dampening the ability of the left hemisphere to do its job of processing language.  The right hemisphere is a crappy language processor; it shouldn’t try to do the left hemisphere’s job, because it does it inefficiently and badly.  By training the right hemisphere so much, and to the exclusion of the left, the result is an increase in inefficient right-hemisphere language.  In other words, MIT actually impeded language learning.  MIT might “rewire” the brain, but not in a way that will help you speak.

Speech-language pathologists have a duty to provide therapy that is evidence-based.  MIT is not even remotely evidence-based.  Seriously, no therapist should be using this, and it’s pretty shoddy reporting of the BBC to write it up like some miracle cure for people with brain damage.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: I hate when old news is presented as the latest research.  I also hate it when journalists don’t do any fact checking.

Ugh, vomit all over this article.

abcsoupdot:

Teaching stroke patients to sing “rewires” their brains, helping them recover their speech, say scientists.

By singing, patients use a different area of the brain from the area involved in speech.

If a person’s “speech centre” is damaged by a stroke, they can learn to use their “singing centre” instead.

BBC News