I find it equally fascinating and annoying how, sometimes, a random tune would start playing in my head, and it sounds so familiar yet I can't seem to put my finger on the song's title, the singer or band who sang it, or even the lyrics. However, that just goes to show how music can be so deeply embedded in our memory that, no matter how old we get or whether we have memory problems, we can still remember and recognize familiar tunes from different moments of our lives.
My grandmother who has had dementia for the past 13 years can still remember the songs she used to listen to back in her day, so we just put those songs on repeat and let her listen to them, and it soothes her. When she's quite lucid, she'll even remember the lyrics to the songs and sing along with the video.
Sarah Sauvé, a music scientist at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, recently conducted a study which suggested that our musical memories may be immune to any age-related cognitive declines or degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. In order to test her hypothesis, she gather a group of 90 adults, ranging from age 18 to 86, and had them listen to a live concert by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, another group of 31 people watched a recording of the concert in a laboratory.
In the test, the researchers had the participants listen to three pieces of music: Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, of which the team assumed all the participants were familiar, and two experimental pieces which were specifically played for the experiment.
The results of the experiment showed that all the participants equally recognized Eine kleine Nachtmusik. On the other hand, they were also all unfamiliar with the two experimental pieces. The same results were found to be true for those who watched the recording in a laboratory.
According to Steffen Herff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, the reason why people can still remember and recognize these familiar tunes even as they age may be due to the emotions attached to those pieces of music, making it more deeply embedded into our minds.
Despite these findings, the study did not look into the participants' cognitive health and functioning so it is uncertain whether any of them have problems with memory or symptoms of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. This study may not have focused on that and so, we cannot make a definitive conclusion about musical memory recognition or recall of people with memory problems like Alzheimer's, but there is growing interest in the use of music to help people with dementia buttress their memory from the progression of the disease.
(Image credit: Nikoloz Gachechiladze/Unsplash)