How Music Helps Strengthen Memory in Alzheimer’s Patients
By Donna Dadkhoo | December 16th, 2019
Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that is defined as a progressive and irreversible brain disease that causes the diagnosed person to experience memory loss, major behavior changes, and a generally lower quality of life.
In the past 10 years, there have been numerous studies on the relation between music and memory enhancement in Alzheimer's patients. It’s an interesting topic with research that has continued to prove the appeared-to-be magical effects of music on increased functional connectivity and memory cognition in the deteriorating brains of people with dementia.
With a disease as debilitating as Alzheimer's, it is quite incredible that something as simple as listening to a favorite song can help the patient feel in control of their memory again, even if it for a short moment.
In a 2018 article from the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, researchers Rebecca G. Deason, Jessica V. Strong, Michelle J. Tat, Nicholas R. Simmons-Stern and Andrew E. Budson aimed to examine how listening to music both with and without lyrics would affect diagnosed Alzheimer’s patient’s implicit and explicit memory. It is important to note that explicit memory is a type of memory that covers information that one must intentionally and consciously work to recall, such as how to solve a math problem. Implicit memory is information that is unconsciously and effortlessly remembered, for example, knowing how to dress yourself every morning.
Deason and her colleagues were able to test the effects of music by assigning specific auditory clips to 15 patients with probable mild Alzheimers and 13 healthy older adults. The music varied between different lyrical and instrumental songs as well as spoken lyrics across three separate sessions. Implicit memory was measured by the mere exposure effect, an effect that suggests repeatedly exposing someone to a stimulus will increase their liking for it. Explicit memory was measured using a “confidence-judgment receiver operating characteristic paradigm,” a particular model that allowed investigation of the individual contributions made by both familiarity and recollection.
The results of this experiment found a significant implicit memory mere exposure effect in Alzheimer’s patients and healthy adults for the lyrical and instrumental songs but not the spoken condition. On the other hand, both these groups had the best explicit memory performance in the spoken condition, then lyrical song, and then finally instrumental conditions. While both these groups performed similarly in the instrumental conditions, healthy adults demonstrated more recollection than Alzheimer patients in the song and spoken conditions, and Alzheimer patients demonstrated more familiarity in the instrumental and song conditions than in the spoken condition.
These findings display the plausibility in music as being a memory intervention for patients with mild Alzheimers. The implicit memory findings suggest that patients with Alzheimer’s show a proclivity for information that is familiar to them, which confirms the mere exposure effect. The explicit memory findings suggest that patients are quite dependent on familiarity. Ultimately it is possible that the benefits of music for enhanced recognition memory performance are limited.
These results have proven to support prior findings, such as one study done by researchers at the Boston University Medical Center in 2010. Nicholas R. Simmons-Stern, Andrew E. Budson, and Brandon A. Ally measure the scope of how music can be used to strengthen memory for associated verbal information in Alzheimer patients and healthy older adults. The results showed that Alzheimer patients performed better on a task of recognition memory for the lyrics of songs when those lyrics were within a song rather than when those lyrics were spoken. Strangely enough, healthy older adults showed no such benefit of music. This research has shown that music processing occurs within a “complex neural network” that engages many different areas of the brain, and these areas tend to be affected by Alzheimer's at a slower rate compared to the areas of the brain that are usually linked with memory.
While further research on the topic is always encouraged, current research allows for music to be incorporated in the treatment of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's. By understanding the power of music, effective therapies can be developed in hopes of enhancing strengthening the parts of the brain involved with attention and memory.
Studies featured in this article:
Rebecca G. Deason, Jessica V. Strong, Michelle J. Tat, Nicholas R. Simmons-Stern & Andrew E. Budson (2019) Explicit and implicit memory for music in healthy older adults and patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease, Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 41:2, 158–169, DOI: 10.1080/13803395.2018.1510904
Simmons-Stern, N. R., Budson, A. E., & Ally, B. A. (2010, May 7). Music as a memory enhancer in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839321000179X?via=ihub.
