What Is the Correlation Between Music & Memory?
Posted on: September 26, 2017
Music is a food for the soul, and is used by music lovers to provide ambience, get motivated, or to relax. Music also has a powerful ability to help control the symptoms of memory loss. Music’s ability to connect with the mind has opened up an area of therapeutic activity that can be applied to older adults with mild cognitive impairment, acute memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia.
Modern senior living organizations like Ventura Townehouse provide dedicated memory care programs for residents who need extra help.
Music has long been an activity that provides a sense of joy, charm, and inspiration to people of all ages, so it’s been a cornerstone of senior living activities for decades. Now, current research has suggested that music helps reset the memory. This is not surprising to memory care experts or mental health professionals. This phenomenon can be explained by imagining the sensation of hearing a familiar song and associating that song with a particular event or era in your life. By leveraging this phenomenon, specialists can use it as a kick start mechanism to help with unlocking lost memories.
Music is able to help stimulate damaged brain cells in a way that other forms of communication can not.
Choice music selection can connect with the psyche and help synchronize it with the entire human system. Research has shown that the introduction of personalized music selections is a valid memory therapy has proven to decrease a person’s reliance on medication to fend off the effects of memory loss. Senior living and assisted living programs often involved performances from musicians, and now music training programs are including performances to private audiences of older adults as part of the skill developing regimen of musicians in training.
Music therapy isn’t restricted to live music.
Some senior living programs provide residents with music listening devices like iPods, and caregivers or family members help them source music that is sentimental to them, or help them discover music they’ve never heard which is another strong activity for fighting memory loss. Because the mind and brain are things that are still not well understood in some areas, alternative therapies like music are still being refined, but an overwhelming amount of research is identifying positive results from music therapy in senior living programs with memory loss.
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