Can music help Alzheimer's patients build memories?

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Boston Globe

Music triggers memories, even for people with Alzheimer’s disease. A big band recording can help them remember their lives when the song was new. But a new study from Boston researchers suggests that music can also help them form new memories.

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Boston University neuroscientist Brandon Ally and his colleagues tested 13 people diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s and 14 healthy adults of similar age to see how well they could recognize lyrics to new, unfamiliar children’s songs. The participants were shown four lines of rhyming lyrics for each of 40 songs on a computer screen. For half the songs, a woman sang the lyrics; for the other half she recited them. After about 10 minutes, the participants were shown lyrics for 40 new songs and the 40 they had previously seen and asked if they recognized them.

People with Alzheimer’s correctly recognized 40 percent of the songs they heard sung compared with 28 percent of songs whose lyrics they heard spoken. The healthy adults didn’t show as much of a difference, recognizing 77 percent of spoken versus 74 percent of sung lyrics. The authors think that the Alzheimer’s patients were drawing on parts of the brain not affected by early memory loss that may respond to music.

If music can help Alzheimer’s patients learn new information, it could help with such tasks as remembering names or when to take daily medications, Ally said, which could allow people to live independently longer during the early stages of the disease.

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