When I was a senior in high school, a close friend of mine was asked to help another friend\u2019s older brother with a psychology experiment. She was going to be singing tracks for him, and all I remember was feeling entirely unsurprised, because she was the best singer I knew and I always been a little jealous of her. Fast-forward four years, and I\u2019m searching through PsycInfo, looking at articles about music and memory, when I come across an incredibly familiar last name. \u201cThat\u2019s so weird,\u201d I think, \u201chow many Simmons-Stern\u2019s could there possibly be in the world?\u201d So I read the article, and as it turns out, it\u2019s the very same study that was being created my senior year, published in a real journal. Not only that, but it\u2019s an incredibly interesting read, which is why I\u2019m going to share it with all of you.<\/p>\n
I would be shocked if you had gone through elementary school without learning a few musical mnemonics. I know that I personally still use the \u201c50 States\u201d song if I\u2019m ever asked to name states (which is, admittedly, a rare occurrence). These types of strategies are useful because they provide you with an organizing tool for the information in the form of a tune, and because the music can then be used a memory cue when you\u2019re trying to remember the information. Recent research, however, has been looking into the value of these types of strategies in helping older adults with Alzheimer\u2019s Disease (AD) to remember facts and events. Alzheimer\u2019s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the US, and the Alzheimer\u2019s Association estimates that as of 2013, about 5 million American\u2019s over the age of 65 are living with the disease (for more information on AD, click here<\/a>). While it involves a general slowing of cognitive processes and many specific deficits such as a loss of the ability to inhibit responses, one of the most notable effects of AD is a loss of episodic memory, or the memory of autobiographical events. The hope of research like the article I read is that memory can be used as a tool combat this episodic memory decline<\/p>\n Simmons-Stern, Budson and Ally (2010) tested 13 patients with AD and 14 healthy older controls, and presented them with the lyrics to unfamiliar children\u2019s songs (the patients were screened before the actual test to make sure the songs were new to them). They most likely chose children\u2019s songs because of their clear, simple tunes and consistent rhyme schemes, which would presumably make them easy to remember. The lyrics \u2013 all sets of four rhyming lines \u2013 appeared on a screen for the participant to read and were accompanied by an audio track, which was the lyrics either sung or spoken. The participants were exposed to 40 lyric sets, half of which were sung and the other half of which were spoken. Afterwards, they were given a recognition test, where sets of lyrics were displayed without audio accompaniment and the participant had to make an \u201cold or new\u201d decision.<\/p>\n The researchers found that patients with AD were significantly more accurate on lyrics that had been sung to them than ones that had only been spoken, whereas healthy older adults did not show any effect of sung-versus-spoken. This is an important finding, because it suggests that music can in fact be used to help improve memory in older adults living with AD. True, it was only a recognition task, which is typically easier than, say, a recall task where the participant actually generates his or her own answer from memory, but maybe, moving forward, it can become more than that. Maybe singing the news to your grandfather will help him keep up to date on what\u2019s happening in the world, or maybe your great-aunt needs a handy jingle about what she has to do that morning.<\/p>\n In any case, it\u2019s a valuable finding \u2013 musical mnemonics aren\u2019t just for third-graders trying to learn prepositions (or was that just my class?). They may actually be a huge step in helping AD patients lead a more successful life.<\/p>\n References:<\/p>\n