Music is the last memory that Alzheimer’s patient lose

Researchers are finding that the regions of the brain that help us encode music-associated memories are the last to go in Alzheimer’s. And that’s what makes music therapy such a powerful opportunity to help people, even those in later stages of Alzheimer’s, to connect with the memories they still have.

You know yourself that certain music brings back intense memories. And there are certain advertising tunes that you can’t get out of your head.

You may have seen the amazing TV special where Tony Bennett, suffering from dementia, went on stage with Lady Gaga and became his old self, singing all his old songs. His wife said, “He just turned on. It was like a light switch.”

I asked several people in a local online support group how music has helped their loved ones.

One man said his wife was terribly agitated. “I majored in German and found an old album of German Christmas carols. That became our go to music whenever she was upset,” he said.

It helped when she didn’t want to shower. He’d put on the music, and she would say, “Oh, I like that one.”

Several people talked about how their loved ones were big Elvis fans. “Whenever her caretaker put on ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ they could get her to do anything. She would start dancing in her chair, and her eyes would light up,” said one person.

One woman took her husband to a weekly drum circle. He had had a stoke and didn’t have full use of his left hand, so he had trouble keeping the rhythm, but he enjoyed drumming and got better at it.

Music is capable of arousing deep and significant emotions. Memories of music can be so well preserved that the merest fragment of a melody stimulates recall of the song’s title or lyrics. The emotional content of music seems to be processed immediately, even by people with severe dementia.

In “How Music Can Reach the Silenced Brain,” Music Therapist Concetta M. Tomaino gives examples of a man struggling to walk who is able to dance to music; a mute, weeping woman who walks the halls hears music and begins singing; and a dementia patient drained of memories recognizes a familiar old tune.

Music is a complex stimulus, involving everything from pitch to rhythm, melody to volume. Consequently, it is not processed in a single area of the brain.

“It is fairly safe to predict that we will discover that certain elements of music are processed in ‘primitive’ brain regions, including some that are highly resistant to the ravages of traumatic injury and disease,” Tomaino said. “Then we must ask: How do these deeper regions of the silenced brain, reached by rhythms or melodies of music, in turn stimulate the brain’s higher regions (or bypass them) so as to switch on motor, cognitive, or emotion-related functions that had appeared lost forever?”

Whatever the reason, music can be a wonderful relief and joy for Alzheimer’s patients.