The impact of temporal lobe epilepsy on musical ability

PURPOSE Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) often show impairment of cognitive processing in different domains. We aimed to evaluate whether also musical ability is impaired in TLE. METHODS We enrolled patients with lesional TLE and without any other neurological or psychiatric disorder. The side and the etiology of the epilepsy were confirmed by EEG and by MRI. We applied a self-developed test of musical ability which evaluates the ability to identify melodies, pitch, rhythm, and emotional content of music. In addition, we compared the results of the patients to the results of age and sex matched healthy control subjects. All patients and subjects were without specific musical training. RESULTS Patients with left TLE showed a significantly lower score in melody recognition, patients with right TLE showed a significantly lower score in identification of emotion in music. In all other aspects of music ability, no significant difference between left and right TLE could be found. We observed a significantly lower total score in patients with left TLE, but not with right TLE, as compared to healthy subjects. There were no differences with respect to sex. CONCLUSION Our data confirm that the recognition of melodies shows left hemisphere dominance whereas the identification of emotions in music shows right hemisphere dominance in patients without musical training. Furthermore, our data show that the impairment of cognitive processing in TLE is reflected even in higher cognitive functions such as music processing. However, this impairment was mild.