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Ahonen is also excited about what
the physioacoustic chair has
to offer people with Alzheimer’s
A more in-depth study on the chair’s effect on Parkinson’s
is one of the aims of U of T’s new centre. “What if we did
it three times a week” asks Almeida. “Or for an hour instead
of just five minutes” He admits he was a skeptic at first,
but is now curious to see if tailored use of the chair can help
patients overcome some of their symptoms without the need
of so much medication.
Ahonen is also excited about what the chair might have to
offer people with Alzheimer’s. One incident in particular
stands out for her. A female client was in the chair, receiving
vibrations at 40 Hz. Ahonen noticed that the woman’s
husband was speaking intensely with her and at one point
was crying. Afterwards, he told Ahonen that his wife had just
recognized him for the first time in years. She had also
remembered the names of their children and the couple was
able to talk about how the children were doing.
“Maybe it’s possible to recreate this,” Ahonen says. She has
since learned that 40Hz may affect a region of the brain
called the thalamus, which is reduced in size in Alzheimer’s
patients. She hopes that, by working through the Music and
Health Research Collaboratory with a team of neuroscientists
interested in the effects of music and sound on the brain,
she can explore how the chair is affecting Alzheimer’s patients
and how it can be used to greatest effect.
Listening to music in more conventional ways may also
hold promise – in relief for patients with fibromyalgia, a
poorly understood disorder. Its hallmark symptoms are pain,
fatigue and disturbed sleep. Once believed to be a disorder
of the connective tissue, some doctors, such as Larry Picard,
a neurologist at the Wasser Pain Management Centre at
Mount Sinai Hospital and an instructor in U of T’s department
of medicine, now believe it to be related to the central
nervous system. “Increasingly, data support the view that
fibromyalgia is a condition of disturbed or disordered pain
processing in the central nervous system,” he says. “Why it
happens is unclear.”
“The current treatments are all less than adequate,”
adds Picard. These include medication, exercise and psychological
support. “We’re trying to look at other ways to help
these people.”
icard surmises that the sleep deprivation and the
pain might be feeding into one another, and creating
a vicious cycle. “If people are deprived of sleep, they
will feel more pain,” he says. “If they feel more pain, they
can’t sleep.” So he has teamed up with Bartel to try to tackle
the sleep side of the equation first.
For some years, Bartel has been designing music that can
influence a person’s brainwave activity. The music, which
is commercially available on the Solitudes label, typically
combines sounds recorded in nature with soothing instrumentals.
The music is affordable, painless and drug-free –
and, according to EEG evidence that Bartel collects for each
new CD, it significantly increases the brainwave activity
associated with sleep.
In a pilot study on fibromyalgia, which just got the goahead
this spring, 20 patients will use the music at night
for a month to try to improve their sleep. They will document
when they use it and will fill out a questionnaire at the
beginning and end of the study, in an attempt to measure
music use, pain levels, sleep success and whether there are
any correlations. There will be no brainwave analysis at
this point and no placebo-controlled arm to the study. But
if they find it helps, the researchers intend to take it further.
Traditionally, music research has been more art than
science, says Bartel. Now, the Music and Health Research
Collaboratory promises to put some scientific heft behind
that wealth of observation, examining not just what music
does to the human body and psyche – but how it does it.
Alison Motluk (BA 1989 Trinity) is a journalist in Toronto.
30 www.magazine.utoronto.ca