Music’s ability to uplift moods, encourage physical activity, or promote relaxation has potential in medical treatments.
Music is an integral part of daily life. Its ability to uplift moods, encourage physical activity, or promote relaxation is widely recognized. This influence is increasingly being harnessed in medical treatments.
In addition to its role in cancer care, pain management, and aiding brain recovery post-stroke, significant progress has been made in utilizing music to support individuals with dementia.
This approach helps to alleviate anxiety and depression while fostering a sense of well-being among individuals and their caregivers. Such benefits improve resilience and enhance the capacity to manage stress and adversity.
Engaging with music—whether through playing instruments, singing, or simply listening—has shown promising effects on cognitive function, particularly in older adults facing dementia or memory challenges.
The profound impact of music on individuals with dementia continues to inspire curiosity and exploration.
Music and the Brain
Around a decade ago, research revealed that listening to music activates multiple areas of the brain. These include the limbic system, which processes emotions and memory, the cognitive regions associated with perception, learning, and reaction, and the motor areas responsible for voluntary movement. This discovery challenged earlier assumptions that music was processed in a limited part of the brain, shedding light on its remarkable neurological influence.
Studies have suggested that music may support the brain’s ability to regenerate and strengthen neural connections. Many forms of dementia are linked to the death of brain cells, raising the possibility that music could play a role in repairing or reinforcing damaged cells and pathways.
The impact on the brain is not uniform, as the greatest benefits appear to come from familiar and cherished music. Favorite songs are closely tied to memory and emotions, releasing feel-good hormones that create a sense of pleasure. Curated playlists featuring personally meaningful music hold the potential to ease daily stress and support emotional well-being.
Research has revealed that regions of the brain associated with musical memories are less affected by Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia compared to other brain areas. This may explain why memories connected to favorite music often remain intact for individuals with these conditions.
Listening to music has also been shown to aid in managing experiences of distress, agitation, and “sundowning”—a phenomenon involving increased confusion during the late afternoon and evening.
A small study conducted by the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research demonstrated the profound impact of music on individuals with dementia. Repeated exposure to favorite songs led to measurable changes in heart rate and movement, directly influenced by musical elements such as rhythm and arrangement. Singing along or recalling memories associated with music further altered heart rate and encouraged emotional and physical responses, highlighting how music can stimulate movement, emotions, and memory recall.
Additional studies have shown reductions in agitation, aggression, and anxiety following music sessions, with participants experiencing improved moods and reduced medication needs. Promising results have also emerged from research on music training programs aimed at supporting cognition in individuals with dementia. Participants engaging in such programs showed improved executive functions—including problem-solving, emotion regulation, and attention—compared to those involved in physical exercise alone.
Music is increasingly recognized as a valuable treatment for dementia. Evidence suggests the best outcomes arise from incorporating a person’s own music preferences alongside other management strategies, such as medication to slow disease progression or alleviate symptoms, to enhance self-care and overall well-being.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.11.019
Abstract
We investigated the neural underpinnings of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of a naturalistic musical stimulus. Participants were scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while listening to a stimulus with a rich musical structure, a modern tango. We correlated temporal evolutions of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of the stimulus, extracted using acoustic feature extraction procedures, with the fMRI time series. Results corroborate those obtained with controlled stimuli in previous studies and highlight additional areas recruited during musical feature processing. While timbral feature processing was associated with activations in cognitive areas of the cerebellum, and sensory and default mode network cerebrocortical areas, musical pulse and tonality processing recruited cortical and subcortical cognitive, motor and emotion-related circuits. In sum, by combining neuroimaging, acoustic feature extraction and behavioral methods, we revealed the large-scale cognitive, motor and limbic brain circuitry dedicated to acoustic feature processing during listening to a naturalistic stimulus. In addition to these novel findings, our study has practical relevance as it provides a powerful means to localize neural processing of individual acoustical features, be it those of music, speech, or soundscapes, in ecological settings.