Legacy Matters

Music stirred her damaged brain

A professor of neurology and neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School describes how a 32 year old woman, born with hydranencephaly, and thought to have been in a persistent vegetative state reacted with joy and delight to music.

I immediately brought her other doctors back into the room, where they began to interact with her in a totally different manner, in some cases holding her hand and trying to speak with her, and treating her more like a normally functioning human being. I was so emotionally moved by her struggle for human definition through the single modality of hearing that I went down to a local electronics shop and bought her an audio cassette player, and some modern and classical music. 

She continued to appear to enjoy the audio cassette player and her music until her death some years later. 

This patient demonstrated the dilemma we face in determining whether people in an apparent persistent vegetative state, who by all objective measure have little or no function in the cerebral hemispheres, have any residual human capacity that would persuade us to sustain their lives, even by artificial means. 

Her case was a reminder of how much we do not understand about the brain, and that even people in an apparent vegetative state may have ways of connecting to the world around them.