“Music, often considered a universal language, has a profound ability to evoke emotions, memories, and even physical responses such as toe-tapping or head-nodding.”
Daniel Levitin “This is Your Brain on Music”
Music is often used as ‘background’ – it’s just there we go about our daily tasks. True, it may make people feel better, as if rooms were friendlier, more homey. Eventually, unless it is something really intrusive like Christmas carols (played over and over again in supermarkets and other stores), or music we personally hate, our brains filter it out. We no longer hear it at all.
Everyone is different. I grew up, for example, studying in silence – and I mostly still work at my desk without music playing. My brother, however, has always had something playing while he works – although it need not be music, it can be news, radio talk, a podcast, as well as wide-ranging musical CDs. He still dislikes having too much quiet and is quite likely to burst into song when a track for which he remembers the words comes on.
People living with dementia are just as different as my brother and I. Usually, like most other people, they like some kinds of music and not others. There are a few but, in my experience, not that many, who do not like music at all. In all my practice, I have only ever met two of these.
With older people, of course, and some younger, they do not respond if they are hard of hearing, and it is necessary to make technical arrangements for this. Balancing these, there are also people who are highly tuned(!), musically and who hear it all too well – I have known 3 of these in the past and it complicates life considerably!
Because music engages a multitude of brain areas, it shows complex interplay between auditory processing, emotion, and memory centres, and provokes emotions through the release of dopamine, our brain’s pleasure molecule, explaining the joy we often find in a favourite tune. It also appeals to the hippocampus, evoking vivid memories …
- Multiple areas of the brain are engaged when we listen to or create music, including the auditory cortex, prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, and hippocampus.
- Music has a strong influence on our emotions due to its interaction with the brain’s reward system, particularly through the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward.
- The connection between music and the hippocampus, a brain area critical for forming and retrieving memories, is why music is frequently used in therapies for dementia.
Before we leave this fascinating subject (for the moment only!), I need to say that using music in working with people with dementia should not be confused with ‘music therapy’. I have heard said done many times and I find it worrying. Music Therapy, like Dramatherapy and Occupational Therapy, is a discipline in itself, with its own rules of practice and codes of conduct. It is neither necessary, nor especially helpful, to call working with music with people with dementia ‘music therapy’. That could lead to only qualified music therapists carrying it out – and there are too few of them, and they are rarely trained in working with people with dementia.
Having said that, it can be very illuminating to understand the science behind the power of music, if only to make it work for you, and avoid the pitfalls (there are always pitfalls).
