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In 2020, an extraordinary video went viral. It featured Marta Cinta González Saldaña, a former dancer who suffered from severe Alzheimer’s disease during her senior years. In the video, Saldaña plays a piece of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and suddenly wakes up and starts moving on to a dance routine that she allegedly rehearsed over and over in her youth.

This type of clip has been shared for years and highlights the amazing way music can rekindle dormant neural pathways in older people suffering from severe dementia. And while music therapy is now a common practice in nursing homes, little research has actually magnified the neural mechanisms behind the phenomena and, in particular, what types of music could optimize the brain’s potential benefits.

Primera Bailarina – Ballet en New York – 1960s – Música para Despertar

A new study, led by Psyche Loui of Northeastern University’s Music Imaging and Neural Dynamics Lab, answered two specific questions about this incredible music-triggered phenomenon. How does an eight-week controlled music therapy program affect the activity and connectivity between the auditory and reward areas of the brain? And it’s the beneficial effects of music amplified when the music is self-selected, focusing on songs that are particularly meaningful to an individual.

To investigate, the research team recruited a small cohort of cognitively healthy seniors. Together with a music therapist, each volunteer created two music playlists: one nicknamed “energizing” and the other “relaxing”.

The cohort was tasked with listening to music from their self-selected playlists for one hour a day, over the course of eight weeks. The one-hour daily music experience was designed to be focused, so each subject was asked to pay attention to their moods, emotions and memories as they listened to their playlists. It wasn’t just about playing songs in the background while doing daily chores.

At the start and end of the study, each participant also took part in a brain imaging test in which they listened to 24 different audio excerpts. Six of these exceptions were self-selected by the participant, while the rest were other pieces of music that spanned many different genres selected by the researchers.

In an email to New Atlas, Loui explained how her team’s findings revealed that the eight-week musical intervention led to greater connectivity in some key brain regions.

“We saw changes in auditory connectivity to the reward system, particularly the connectivity between the auditory network and the medial prefrontal cortex (which is part of the reward system) was increased after surgery,” noted Loui. “We also saw that the right executive control network, which includes regions important for attention and executive function, has become more precise in representing the music after the intervention.”

According to Loui, this study is the first time that a music-based intervention has been shown to cause longitudinal improvements in connectivity between these particular brain networks. From a clinical point of view, these findings are exciting, as reduced connectivity and activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is observed in a number of neurodegenerative conditions, as well as in psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression.

The study’s other big finding was that self-selected music is much more effective at engaging these brain pathways than other less familiar types of music. Loui also added that the most effective self-selected music appears to be related to a participant’s younger years.

First discovery: the auditory and reward systems really love self-selected music! Music that was rated as beloved and very familiar was also good at engaging these same regions 6 / pic.twitter.com/AGylad72t6

“… we had participants listening to about a third of the self-selected music and two-thirds of the music selected by the researchers, while their brains were scanned, so that they could compare brain activity between the self-selected and the self-selected music. selected by others, [and] we found that self-selected music was much more effective in engaging the brain, “explained Loui. “The most effective music tends to be adolescent and early adulthood for the participant.”

The discovery that the most effective music to rekindle neural pathways in old age is that heard in youth is interestingly reminiscent of a large body of studies that illustrate how music and cultural taste are fundamentally formed in a person’s adolescence. Film theorist David Bordwell once called this phenomenon “the law of the adolescent’s window” and these new brain imaging discoveries surely affirm that some neural pathways linked to cultural experiences are indeed stuck in these key formative years.

“Between the ages of 13 and 18, a window opens for each of us,” Bordwell wrote. “The cultural pastimes that attract us then, the ones we find ourselves attracted to and even obsessive to, will always have a strong hold. We may broaden our tastes as we grow up in those years – we should, anyway – but the sports, hobbies, books, TV, movies and music we loved we will love forever. “

A key point of the study is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all strategy for music therapy, Loui pointed out. So listening to music you like is important, but what this study cannot answer is exactly how clinically effective music therapy can be as a treatment for patients with dementia.

A study published last year by University of Toronto researchers explored an intervention similar to Loui’s work, but in Alzheimer’s patients with very early cognitive decline. It was a small studio comparing the effect between musicians and non-musicians of three weeks of daily one-hour listening sessions with familiar music.

While brain activity was slightly different in participants with a history of music playing, there were distinct signs of cognitive improvement in both groups after three weeks of music therapy. Senior study author Michael Thaut said listening to familiar music in the senior years can be considered a kind of brain gym.

“Whether you’ve been a longtime musician or have never played an instrument, music is a key to your memory, your prefrontal cortex,” said Thaut. “It’s simple: keep listening to the music you’ve loved all your life. Your absolute favorite songs, those pieces that are particularly meaningful to you. Make it your brain gym.

Of course, it’s too early to suggest that simply listening to your favorite music can help fight the neurodegeneration associated with diseases like Alzheimer’s. Loui, however, is looking to delve into these new findings with some follow-up investigations to see if things can be added to a music listening session as a way to amplify the effects on the brain.

“We’re trying to do a control surgery that doesn’t involve listening to music,” said Loui. “We are also looking to augment this music-based intervention with multimodal stimulation, eg. using lights to add to music to enhance the experience of rhythmic stimulation on the brain.

The new study was published in Scientific Reports.

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