Patients with Alzheimer’s disease, which leads to severe memory impairment and weakening other mental abilities, remember new information better when presented in the context of music, according to an American study published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
According to the authors of the study, this discovery may find practical application in the treatment and care of Alzheimer’s patients. Alzheimer’s disease is a brain-wasting condition accompanied by gradual deterioration of memory and other mental abilities, as well as changes in the patient’s personality. It mainly affects people over 65 years of age. The first visible symptoms of the disease are usually problems with recalling events. Currently, there are no methods to cure the disease, but neurologists are trying to use various methods to slow it down and improve the functioning of the affected people in the environment. Scientists from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Boston conducted research on a group of Alzheimer’s patients and among healthy people. Both groups were presented with the texts of 40 different songs on a computer screen, half of them were accompanied by a recording of a given song, and the other by a recording of a voiceover reading its words. After the presentation of each text, it was checked how the way the text was presented influenced remembering in people from both groups. It turned out that patients with Alzheimer’s had a better memory of the lyrics that were displayed to them to the accompaniment of music than those accompanied by the voice of the teacher. However, in the case of healthy people, the musical context did not provide similar benefits. According to Dr. Brandon Ally, researcher who participated in the study, these results indicate that between Alzheimer’s patients and healthy people there are fundamental differences in the process of recording in the brain and retrieval (retrieval ???) of musical information and stimuli of a different nature. Music is processed by a complex network of neurons recruiting from many different parts of the brain, which in Alzheimer’s patients are degraded more slowly than the areas of the brain typically associated with memory. Therefore, information that accompanies music can be better encoded than information that is accompanied by speech alone, Dr. Ally explains. In his opinion, understanding the processes of music processing and memory in Alzheimer’s patients can help in the development of effective methods of helping this group of patients. This is especially important in the face of the constant aging of societies, as this disease will occur more and more often. (PAP)