After suffering a brain hemorrhage, 7-year-old Charlotte Neve slipped into a coma. The British girl was unconscious for several days and doctors feared she wouldn’t recover. Her mother, Leila Neve, was at her bedside when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” started playing on the radio. Leila and Charlotte often sang the song together and Leila began singing along.

Then something remarkable happened: Charlotte smiled. Within two days, she could speak and get out of bed. Why does music seem to help "awaken" some people from their comas?

“It was a salient stimulus, something that she is familiar with, like [her] name,” says Dr. Emery Neal Brown, professor of anesthesia at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and professor of computational neuroscience at MIT.

Brown suspects Charlotte recovered some brain functioning prior to hearing the Adele song, but it was imperceptible. When she heard the song, she smiled and eventually woke because it held meaning for her (that's the salient stimulus part).  

“Maybe people have function recovered and we don’t know how to communicate with them,” he says, explaining a salient stimulus varies by person.

“Whenever memories have an emotional context to them, they tend to hold much more power in the brain and tend to be processed differently,” says Dr. Javier Provencio, director of the Neurological Critical Care Unit at Cleveland Clinic.

Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees woke from his coma when his family played music for him — music for a professional musician who sang with his brothers would have deep meaningful connections in the brain, sparking a reaction. But for someone who plays tennis or rides horses, a song might not encourage a response. 

But sometimes, music causes a reaction because the brain processes songs differently than spoken language. In these cases, the region of the brain responsible for song might be working better while the language lags behind.

“We clearly process music and tonal things differently than language. There are patients [who had strokes] who cannot talk but can still sing,” says Provencio.

The left cerebral hemisphere controls language, while the right processes song and music. Patients who have damage in the left might respond better to song.

“They lose the ability to talk and understand. Music therapy is really useful because it is used in the non-dominate hemisphere,” says Dr. James Bernat, professor of neurology and medicine at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.

Music therapists such as Lee Anna Rasar at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire often use music to try to evoke responses from comatose patients. She notes that songs are most effective “if the music is something they knew before that already had meaning.”

All the physicians agree that doctors still have limited understanding of whether someone will recover from a coma, but if Charlotte wasn’t already healing, she wouldn’t have smiled at the song.

“Even in a coma, it’s quite common that these people improve spontaneously,” says Bernat. “They wake up and start responding. It isn’t outside the range of what is expected that there would be improvement over time.”

Related:

• Adele song wakes girl from coma
• You will never get 'Call Me Maybe' out of your head
• Can't carry a tune? You may be amusic

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Maggie Meier couldn’t feel pain, she couldn’t interact with people, she couldn’t eat, she couldn’t turn over in bed without help and she certainly couldn’t walk.

But for brief periods, the 14-year-old basketball star from Blue Valley Northwest High School in Overland Park, Kan., would awake from her coma and pass a ball in her hospital room with perfect form.

“She was very severely ill,” neurologist Dr. William Graf, who treated Meier in 2008-2009 at a Kansas City hospital, told msnbc.com Friday. “The depth of her coma is not in question. The way she woke up from it is highly unique.”

Maggie’s shooting skills while comatose, and her remarkable recovery, have attracted international attention ever since she and her family went public a couple of weeks ago in the Kansas City Star. 

Graf, professor of neurology and pediatrics at Yale, figures that shooting a basketball must have been hardwired into a part of Maggie’s brain that remained relatively unscathed from illness sparked by a respiratory infection.

“This was a wiped-out memory bank,” he says, “but one thing that wasn’t wiped out was her ability to shoot with perfect form.”

From third grade on, “she probably shot 500 times a day,” he says, emphasizing, “this girl was a star athlete. It needs to be clear that she was super, to the point of being on a national championship team.”

Meier's case was a first for Graf -- and while it might be possible for a comatose concert pianist to be able to play a keyboard before recovering any other ability -- it’s unclear “why someone would have a certain function come back faster than another,” he says.

A high school freshman, Maggie had just lettered in varsity volleyball and was scheduled to play on the school basketball team when she became ill in November 2008. She’d been complaining of a bad headache and then started having nonstop seizures.

It took Graf and his colleagues a few weeks to figure out what was making Maggie so sick. She had a rare brain infection called mycoplasma meningoencephalitis. It's not known how she contracted the illness.

Graf remembered a patient he’d seen in the mid-1990s who had the same infection. That boy went on to make a full recovery. He shared the story with Maggie’s parents, with whom he’d bonded over their shared love of girls’ basketball. Graf has a daughter who plays college basketball.

“This is a bad illness,” Graf told them. “We need to support her through this. You’re going to have to be very patient.” After she’d been in a coma for two months, though, Graf says, even he was starting to get cold feet.

Maggie spent 100 days in the hospital, her mother Margaret, a nurse, by her side the entire time, Graf says. After coming out of the coma, she spent eight months learning how to walk and read again. “When I saw her five months out, I was thinking we’re looking at moderate disability here.” She was still drooling, and the former honors student could barely read a Dr. Seuss book. “I thought she’d need a lot of special education.”

But Maggie surpassed everyone’s expectations. “This girl is a fighter. And, like a little kid, she reprogrammed her brain.”

Although she missed her freshman year, her teachers helped Maggie regain her reading ability and is graduating with her class this year. She’ll attend college in the fall. Her best physical therapy, Graf says, has been her return to the basketball court and participation on the varsity team.

Says Graf, “If you’re an optimist, the cup is 90 percent, 95 percent full here.”

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