"Eventually the number of notes increased until they seemed to be parts of tunes. "I did everything I could to get rid of them but they persisted, always in a minor key and therefore a bit depressing," she said. Initially the condition was irritating and affected Sylvia's sleep, but she learnt to live with it. Due to her musical knowledge Sylvia was able to notate what she was hearing. Then about eleven years later she experienced a sudden acute hearing loss and severe tinnitus and her musical hallucinations developed after this. Sylvia, 69, a maths teacher who is also a musician with perfect pitch, started to go deaf about 20 years ago after a viral infection. These findings could lead to a better understanding of the condition and possibly treatments in the future. This study by researchers at Newcastle University and University College London and funded by the Wellcome Trust has looked in depth at one sufferer of the condition and pinpointed the regions of the brain involved in producing the hallucinations. However in a small number of people with hearing loss these hallucinations take the form of music, but until now the brain mechanisms underlying this process were poorly understood. Nearly one in ten people suffer from tinnitus which is technically an auditory hallucination, in which tones or buzzing noises are heard following hearing loss. Initially they often mistake the experience for actual music playing and while musical hallucinations can occasionally be a symptom of a neurological or psychiatric disorder, it is usually caused by hearing loss in people who are in normal physical and mental health.ĭr Sukhbinder Kumar from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, lead author of the paper published in Cortex said: "We found that a network of brain areas, that are usually involved in processing of melodies and retrieval of memory of music, were particularly active during hallucinations of music in the absence of any sound or music being played externally." Sufferers persistently perceive music, as if they were hearing it with their ears, when no music is actually being played.
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