Over the past few years, scientists have been trying to understand how listening to music affects your brain. One of the features of music that seems to be important is whether you have an emotional connection to it. In other words, listening to a favorite tune will have a different effect on your brain than an unknown or disliked piece of music.
Now, a new study has shown that people with Alzheimer’s Disease can improve their cognition by listening to music that has personal meaning to them, such as songs they’ve been listening to for years.
Listening to favorite music could be beneficial for cognition in people with early stage Alzheimer's ... [+]
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Researchers Corinne Fischer, Nathan Churchill and colleagues from the University of Toronto ran a small study to find out what exactly happens when people with Alzheimer’s listened to their favorite songs. They asked fourteen people with early stage Alzheimer’s Disease to spend one hour per day listening to music they enjoyed and were very familiar with. Before and after the test period all participants also took a cognitive test, and had their brain activity measured by functional MRI (fMRI).
During these fMRI scans, the participants also listened to music. They got to hear songs from their own favorite playlist but also a selection of completely new music that they’d never heard before. If they heard new music, they mainly used brain areas required for listening to the music, but if they heard one of their old favorites, other parts of the brain were active, including those involved in cognition.
And indeed, when they were tested on their overall cognition skills, the research volunteers performed better after they had listened to their favorite music. Of the fourteen volunteers, six were themselves musicians, and for them the effects were even stronger, but even the non-musicians responded well to listening to music.
This suggests that music therapy could be a great help for people with early stage Alzheimer’s Disease. “Music-based interventions may be a feasible, cost-effective and readily accessible intervention for those in early-stage cognitive decline,” says Fischer in a statement to the University of Toronto. “While larger controlled studies are required to confirm clinical benefits, our findings show that an individualized and home-based approach to music-listening may be beneficial and have lasting effects on the brain.”
The next step for the research is to try it with a larger group of participants and figure out whether it’s the music itself that helps them remember, or whether it’s the personal and emotional bond they have with the songs they chose.
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