Enjoyment of music is a powerful way of lifting the spirit, and music is often used in creative activities with elderly people and people with dementia. Now a new study has found that listening to certain tunes from your past evokes powerful and vivid memories that appear to be immune from Alzheimer’s disease.
A team from the University of California, led by Professor Petr Janata, has discovered that the section of the brain which is associated with music is also associated with our most vivid memories. It is also the region of the brain which seems to be the most immune from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Memory for autobiographically important music seems to be spared in people with Alzheimer’s disease,” Prof Janata said, and one of his long-term goals is “to use this research to help develop music-based therapy for people with the disease.”
“Providing patients with MP3 players and customized playlists could prove to be a quality-of-life improvement strategy that would be both effective and economical.”
“What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head.”
“It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye. Now we can see the association between these two things – the music and the memories.”
(The study “The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories” is published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.)
