Alzheimer's Patients Remember Better When You Put It To Music
Put it to music, and the person with Alzheimer's disease (AD) will be more likely to remember it. A study was done at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) that indicates that people with Alzheimer's disease can better recall information when it's conveyed by music.
Participants in the study were shown the lyrics to forty songs. Half of them were accompanied by recorded singing, and the other half by a spoken recording. Recall was better for the lyrics presented with singing. Interestingly, no such improvement was observed in the healthy control subjects.
Dr. Brandon Ally said, "Music processing encompasses a complex neural network that recruits from all areas of the brain, that are affected at a slower rate in AD compared to the areas of the brain typically associated with memory. Thus, stimuli accompanied by music and a sung recording may create a more robust association at encoding than do stimuli accompanied by only a spoken recording in patients with AD."
This new research may be helpful in leading to new ways of treating people with Alzheimer's disease.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100512112314.htm
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