Summary: Nostalgic music activates brain areas related to memory, reward, and self-processing. This discovery could help improve the quality of life of people with dementia.
The study shows that music can evoke vivid memories, providing a potential therapeutic tool for neurodegenerative diseases. Understanding these mechanisms could lead to new treatments for memory-related conditions.
Highlights:
- Brain activation: Nostalgic music activates the brain areas of memory, reward and self-processing.
- Potential therapy: Music could help dementia patients recall memories, thereby improving their quality of life.
- Future research: The findings could lead to new treatments for memory-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Source: U.S.C.
Go put on one of your all-time favorite songs, the one you’ve been listening to your whole life. What thoughts are going through your head? Memories of home? The first time you saw the love of your life?
Nostalgic music – music that we strongly associate with a time in our lives – can evoke deep emotions at any age. The origin of this phenomenon remains a mystery, but studies have shown that music can generate strong emotional responses, both calming and invigorating.
A team of USC scientists is getting closer to understanding what happens in your brain when you hear a favorite song — and the results could have profound effects on people battling dementia and Alzheimer’s disease .
“Listening to nostalgic music not only engages the brain’s traditional memory networks, but also engages the brain’s reward, storytelling, and self-processing systems,” says Assal Habibi, a USC researcher and director of the USC Dornsife Center for Music, Brain. and society.
“These are the brain mechanisms by which we think you can listen to 10 seconds of nostalgic music, and it can take you back to something alive, like your high school prom. We could then use that music as a way to actually help people with Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
Music, movement and learning
Understanding how music affects cognition and the brain as an organ are the two interests that underpin Habibi’s work. An associate research professor of psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Habibi uses a variety of tools, including neuroimaging and psychometric testing, to measure the effect of environmental factors such as music on our brains.
As the center’s founder, Habibi sought to bring together experts from USC Dornsife, the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the USC Thornton School of Music and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering to study music and its impact on our emotions, our movements. and learning. Founded in 2023, the center is currently pursuing three lines of research.
A project explores how learning to play a musical instrument helps foster better cognitive and language skills in a child’s developing brain.
The research, carried out in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Youth Orchestra Program and Heart of Los Angeles and funded by the LA Philharmonic and GROW at Annenberg Foundation, also led to new insights into the connection between music and emotional regulation.
But it’s the project about triggering emotions that is at the heart of why music resonates so strongly with us.
“Our hope is that by understanding how music evokes nostalgia and autobiographical memory in healthy young and older adults, we will be able to apply these findings to older adults with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s and other associated dementias,” Habibi explains.
Revealing lost memories
To study how nostalgic music could help people recall memories, Habibi and doctoral student Sarah Hennessy enlisted experts in machine learning, MRI and psychology to identify what happens in the brain when music reveals a lost memory.
To assess a participant’s ability to recall a memory, the researchers assigned a value to its “vividness,” Habibi explains. She describes it as a formula that psychologists use to measure how detailed “your perception and sense of experience is in your description.”
“Vividness measures the amount of detail that goes into describing a memory,” Habibi explains.
“If I just say, ‘I went to the grocery store and did this and that,’ it doesn’t really remind me of your memory, just the state of it. But if you have details like remembering that the room was dark, that’s a more vivid memory.
The idea gave rise to two parallel studies by Habibi and Hennessy.
The first included two groups of people, 30 younger and 30 older, who presented researchers with a playlist of songs that evoked memories and powerful emotions. The researchers then used an algorithm developed by Hennessy and colleagues at USC Viterbi to find songs very similar to those in the self-selected playlist to serve as a control.
Participants then entered an MRI scanner to scan their brains while listening to the nostalgic songs, the control songs, and then completely unfamiliar music. Next, participants were asked to describe memories related to nostalgic music and researchers assigned them a vividness score. Hennessy says the neuroimaging results were “incredible.”
“When you hear nostalgic music, there is activity throughout your brain, but particularly in the default mode network, which is normally active when we daydream,” she says.
“It’s also active when we reflect on our own narrative. We also have activity in certain visual areas that normally process what you see in front of you.
“But all these participants had their eyes closed. So what might happen is that participants visualize what was in front of them during the memory evoked by the song.
Improve quality of life
In the second study, a separate group of 150 people of color listened to different types of music for 12 weeks. Some weeks they would hear nostalgic music. Other weeks, they listened to familiar music that wasn’t nostalgic.
Participants were then asked to describe an autobiographical memory related to the song or music. Again, the researchers assigned a vividness score to participants’ responses.
The results of the study, which will form the basis of a future article, will help determine whether nostalgic music evokes a more vivid memory. Habibi says that understanding why music provokes a response in the brain’s reward and storytelling systems could be used “as a means of therapeutic intervention for people with dementia.”
“This specific model of encoding and retrieval of nostalgic music seems unique, and music’s ability to retrieve autobiographical memories is personalized and relative to your story and narrative,” says Habibi.
“If nostalgic music can help dementia patients access memories that are not usually accessible to them, it can improve quality of life, even if temporarily.
“If a patient is with their children and they remember a birthday party associated with a song and details of it, it can bring back the richness and emotional connection of that memory,” adds- she said.
Connecting to a sense of self
Habibi and Hennessy continue to study the mind-music connection. Habibi, along with researchers from USC Thornton and the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, recently received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab to study the “effects of musical engagement on hearing, communication and psychosocial well-being in people affected or at risk. for Alzheimer’s disease, as well as their caregivers.
Hennessy is expected to complete his doctorate in May and presented the results of the MRI study at the NeuroMusic conference held at McMaster University in Canada in November 2023.
Analysis of the study focusing on dementia in people of color continues and will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication in the coming months.
Currently, Habibi, Hennessy and doctoral student Ellen Herschel are conducting a clinical trial for a music intervention app for people with dementia. Habibi says that for many dementia patients, the struggle with forgetting causes a lot of turmoil.
The app will play them music that isn’t necessarily nostalgic, but will help support their emotional regulation when they’re having trouble not remembering a memory.
Hennessy says researchers hope that understanding how music evokes nostalgia and autobiographical memory in healthy young and older people will allow future research to study how these findings might be applied to older adults with neurodegenerative diseases.
“Investigating the mechanism by which music evokes these powerful emotions and memories in the brain can help us understand how memories evoked by music remain relatively spared in Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias,” says Hennessy.
“Nostalgic music allows us to connect to our identity,” she adds.
“As this sense of self is often diminished by neurodegenerative diseases, we hope that this type of tailor-made musical intervention can help patients – if only for the duration of the song – to experience a ‘return to self’ temporary by engaging in these self-referential and autobiographical areas of the brain activated by music.
About this music and memory research news
Author: Paul McQuiston
Source: U.S.C.
Contact: Paul McQuiston – USC
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
News Source : neurosciencenews.com
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