A patient in a hospital bed. This photo is not directly related to the article. [123rf]
A patient in a hospital bed. This photo is not directly related to the article. [123rf]

A woman's account of experiencing music played in her hospital room as "torture" while she lay in a coma has drawn wide attention abroad.

According to Argentine outlet La Nacion on Sept. 9 (local time), Kenya Moreno, a young woman from Andalusia, Spain, recently shared on social media her experience of spending a month in a coma.

At the time of her hospitalization, Moreno was an avid fan of Spanish duo Gemeliers. Her mother, hoping to comfort her, bought the group's album "Lo mejor está por venir" and played it in the hospital room.

The problem was that the same album played on repeat for an entire month. Recalling the experience, Moreno pleaded: "Please, do not play music for someone who is in a coma — or at least, if I ever fall into a coma again, don't play music for me."

"People in a coma can hear sounds," she said. "I kept hearing that song. It was pure torture, because the same song just kept repeating over and over."

Moreno said she remembers not only the music but also the cold. She said she felt an intense chill throughout the entire month, and only after waking did she learn it had been caused by the room's air conditioning.

"I was in a truly strange place, it was freezing cold, and the song just kept playing without end," she said.

Bee Gees' Robin Gibb woke to music — 'the brain processes it differently from language'

The story has reignited interest in how much awareness coma patients retain of sounds and events around them.

A 2024 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that cognitive activity can occur even in patients who show no outward response to commands.

When researchers analyzed 241 patients who had not responded behaviorally to verbal instructions, 60 of them — 25 percent — showed brain activity on fMRI or EEG scans consistent with mentally performing tasks as directed. The researchers described the phenomenon as "cognitive-motor dissociation."

NBC News previously reported the case of Robin Gibb, a member of the legendary British pop group the Bee Gees, who emerged from a coma after his family played music for him.

His family sang and played music at his bedside continuously, hoping he would recover. Gibb is said to have regained consciousness while listening to "The Titanic Requiem," a piece he had composed with his son.

Music can elicit responses in some patients because the brain processes it differently from spoken language. James Bernat, a professor of neurology and internal medicine at Dartmouth Medical School, said, "Patients with left-hemisphere damage lose the ability to speak and understand language," adding, "but music therapy is very useful because it acts on the non-dominant hemisphere of the brain."


bbo@heraldcorp.com