New research reveals the power of music therapy on memory

A recent study conducted by Psyche Loui, associate professor of music and director of the Music Imaging and Neural Dynamics Lab at Northeastern University, revealed that music may be the key to improving one’s memory.

There has long been a positive correlation between music and alleviating suffering from brain diseases such as dementia. Because music often has ties to emotions and meaningful life events, listening to familiar songs with such connotations can instantly transport a person back to a particular moment in time. 

“Listening to music with special significance can stimulate neural pathways in the brain,” said Michael Thaut, a researcher from the University of Toronto. 

Researchers are furthering this idea with the hypothesis that music is the component that bridges sound and desires together within the brain in order to improve memory. 

“There’s something about music that is this functional connectivity between the auditory and reward system, and that’s why music is so special and able to tap into these seemingly very general cognitive functions that are suddenly very engaged in folks with dementia who are hearing music,” Loui said. 

To test her theory, Loui and her team of researchers conducted a study on adults between the ages of 54 and 89 from the Boston area. Compiling a number of highly personalized playlists consisting of a wide variety of music genres, Loui had her research participants listen to these playlists for an hour each day over the course of 8 weeks. Participants underwent brain scans both before and after listening to music to gauge neurological responses, and also rated each song they listened to based on its familiarity and overall appeal. 

Loui’s study found that music has the ability to create a direct auditory connection to the medial prefrontal cortex, or the brain’s central reward center. When people listen to music that they are well versed in and enjoy, the medial prefrontal cortex is activated.

“The medial prefrontal cortex is one of the areas to lose its activity and functional connectivity in aging adults, especially in folks with dementia,” Loui said. 

Thus, activating this part of the brain through music is important because it allows for stronger connections in the brain to be made, paving the way for memory recovery.

Consistently listening to personally meaningful music greatly enhances the brain’s adaptability— the ability to make connections—  in patients suffering from early Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. In looking at magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) taken of patients before and after listening to music that was significant to them, musical neural networks could be seen connecting different regions of the brain. 

“It’s simple — keep listening to the music that you’ve loved all your life. Your all-time favorite songs, those pieces that are especially meaningful to you — make that your brain gym.” Thaut said. 

Music therapies have also proven successful in improving communication and human relationships, as well as reducing agitation. Music elicits emotional responses in its listeners, and as music has long been used as a way to tell stories and share ideas and feelings, music has the ability to not only connect together different parts of the brain, but it also has the ability to connect people together. 

Moving forward, Loui hopes that her findings will lead to new initiatives and programs surrounding music therapy in improving memory, as well as overall brain cognition. 

“We’re trying to design these new therapies to take advantage of the rhythmic properties of music and the rhythmic properties of the brain…and the tuning of neural populations towards the acoustic signals of the music might be useful for improving cognition” Loui said.