PLT Test Blog

Today’s post is about music and music therapy. A new study reports that music therapy does not improve autism symptoms. In an earlier post we saw that singing reduces the level of your stress hormone cortisol; this was based on testing adults in a choir, so not music novices. Music has actually been shown to do much more than just reduce your level of stress, it can actually affect the expression of your genes, but only in those who are “musically experienced”; in people with little experience of music it does nothing.   The effect of listening to music on human transcriptome Although brain imaging studies have demonstrated that listening to music alters human brain structure and function, the molecular mechanisms mediating those effects remain unknown . With the advent of genomics and bioinformatics approaches, these effects of music can now be studied in a more detailed fashion. To verify whether listening to classical music has any effect on human transcriptome, we performed ge...

Today’s post is science free, since for some of the original readers this blog it has become heavy going at times. Monty, now aged 13 with autism, is about to move up to mainstream secondary/high school.   While this might sound quite a normal transition I really doubt his kindergarten teacher ever thought he would make it that far, in a meaningful way. Even I thought that finishing mainstream primary/junior school would be quite a challenge. One reader of this blog is Monty’s kindergarten teacher who has known him from before his diagnosis, a decade ago. Outside of the North America people tend not to want to diagnose autism in three year olds and parents do not want to hear reports from kindergarten that things may not be so good. Even being non-verbal may not ring alarm bells with pediatricians; where we live it is put down as “dysphasia”. In spite of the tell-tale signs, the differences at the age of three between classic autism and typical are not so big.   We do not...