Music can benefit patients of Alzheimer’s

California, February 24: Patients of Alzheimer’s disease could benefit by listening to their favorite tunes from the past, says an international research team.

Professor Petr Janata and his team from the University of California said that music may extract strong responses from people with Alzheimer's Disease.

On scanning the brain activity of 13 subjects, who listened to 30 of their favorite songs, the researchers discovered that the part of the brain associated with music is also associated with our most vibrant memories.

Songs linked to the most salient memories were the ones that induced the most emotional and strong responses.

One particular area in the brain probably serves as a hub that links familiar music, memories and emotions. This area is the pre-frontal cortex, which also happens to be the most-shielded from the effects of Alzheimer's disease.

"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," Janata said. "Now we can see the association between those two things – the music and the memories."

Mp3 players and music playlists customized to individual tastes can form quite an inexpensive therapy for improving the quality of life. "Because memory for autobiographically important music seems to be spared in people with Alzheimer's disease, one of the long-term goals is to use this research to help develop music-based therapy for people with the disease," the professor said.

The study titled ‘The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories,’ is published in the journal Cerebral Cortex. It was supported by a Templeton Advanced Research Program grant from the Metanexus Institute.