by CARL ZIMMER
The sheet music of a 66-year-old woman’s musical hallucinations. Researchers reported that her daily hallucination sequences were each two to four bars in length, with each being repeated for periods lasting tens of minutes. IMAGE/Sukhbinder Kumar
http://youtu.be/2SCSxDQZAfk
In 2011, a 66-year-old retired math teacher walked into a London neurological clinic hoping to get some answers. A few years earlier, she explained to the doctors, she had heard someone playing a piano outside her house. But then she realized there was no piano.
The phantom piano played longer and longer melodies, like passages from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto number 2 in C minor, her doctors recount in a recent study in the journal Cortex. By the time the woman — to whom the doctors refer only by her first name, Sylvia — came to the clinic, the music had become her nearly constant companion. Sylvia hoped the doctors could explain to her what was going on.
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The study was based on a simple idea. Sometimes people with musical hallucinations say that hearing real music can quiet the imaginary tunes. Researchers had already found that they could use a similar method to mask tinnitus, in which people have a nagging ringing in the ears.
“The idea came to us, why not try masking music hallucination?” said Sukhbinder Kumar, a staff scientist at Newcastle University and one of the study’s co-authors.
The New York Times for more