“Our voice is our most creative and musical instrument.
It has great power to touch our lives and the lives of others.” – Ted Andrews
Among the most interesting phenomena to demonstrate the power of the voice’s influence are those in which the voice is the catalyst for coming out of a coma. By definition, people in a coma are fully unconscious and have no idea what is going on around them. There are no medications or medical devices that can help them regain consciousness. Yet some of these people miraculously wake upon hearing the voices of relatives or friends. Doctors cannot fully explain this phenomenon, yet they employ the vocal sound because it works. In many neurological hospitals around the world, relatives visit coma patients and talk to them, even though they are unresponsive. There are no rules about what relatives have to say or how to talk to the patients. Some reminisce about events experienced together, others cry and shout at the patient to wake up, and so on. American Godfrey Catanus awoke from coma after three months when being played recordings in which his wife and brother recounted the most emotional moments they had spent together [1]. In the United Arab Emirates, Munira Abdulla woke from a 27-year coma upon hearing her son Omar arguing with the nurses in the hospital ward [2]. It is hard to find common ground between the patients and the events that brought them back to consciousness. Indeed, many patients do not wake up from the state of coma even after years despite having ‘heard’ their relatives’ voices countless times. Doctors have no explanation as to why. In the scientific studies that have been carried out, only the effects that the voices of relatives have produced in the brains of patients have been monitored, but no analyses have been done on the voices themselves. Perhaps in the cases of those who have woken from a coma, the relatives have had more influence over them than in the other cases. Maybe if relatives were taught to talk to patients in a certain way and to use certain tones of voice, it would have enough of an impact on the patients to wake them up! Read more about the Power of the Voice.
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