Music Can Help Us Remember Lost Memories
Have you ever listened to a song that made you reminisce about a specific moment in your past or helped calm you down? We aren’t just imagining these feelings — science backs up their existence. Psyche Loui, an associate professor of music, is attempting to use music to encourage dementia patients to recall distant memories. She got the idea for the study after playing music in various nursing homes. She found that people could harmonize or even sing along when she was playing, even if they could not finish a sentence before that. Loui and her team of music therapists, neurologists, and geriatric psychiatrists studied a group of older adults aged 54 to 89 from the Boston area. They had them listen to a playlist for an hour each day for eight weeks and write their response down in a journal. Loui and her team would scan the participants’ brains before and after listening
to measure their neurological responses. The playlists featured the participants’ self-selected songs as well as a preselected mix of classical pieces, pop and rock songs, and new compositions. The researchers found that the music helped create a channel directly between the auditory center and the medial prefrontal cortex, the brain’s reward center. This area also happens to lose functional connectivity in aging adults, especially those with dementia. Music that the participants selected showed a strong connection between these areas of the brain. After discovering successful results, Loui hopes to extend her study to older adults who have cognitive and neurodegenerative disorders, as they could greatly benefit from the effects of music therapy. If you’re trying to remember a fond memory, throw on some of your favorite music from that time in your life and prepare to reminisce.
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