

Alzheimer's Disease and Musical Memory - flannery
http://blog.oup.com/2015/07/alzheimers-disease-musical-memory-neurology

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beat
"I'll Be Me", a recent documentary about musician Glen Campbell, addressed
this directly. The movie very bravely and directly addresses his and his
family's struggle with Alzheimer's, following him on his last tour, as he
slowly but surely loses his mind.

One of the most fascinating things was that his ability to play music was the
last thing to go. He'd be on stage performing, unable to even remember his
children's names (or that they were his children) when introducing the band,
but he'd then shred up a storm on the guitar. He'd sing songs he made famous
back in the 1960s, with a teleprompter to keep the lyrics going. But he could
play music!

Another interesting side of the documentary was how he used his tremendous
personal charm and charisma to get around the failings of his memory and
thinking. If he couldn't answer a question, he'd turn it into a joke or change
the subject, easily leading even professionals off the scent. On the other
hand, the movie followed his most personal interactions, the near-violent
outbursts with his wife and closest friends that only got worse as the
dementia wore on.

Fascinating documentary. I highly recommend it if you're into this subject.

~~~
Mz
_Another interesting side of the documentary was how he used his tremendous
personal charm and charisma to get around the failings of his memory and
thinking. If he couldn 't answer a question, he'd turn it into a joke or
change the subject, easily leading even professionals off the scent._

My dad did that kind of thing as his memory went. I think it is self
preservation. It is really dangerous to let people know how impaired you are.

One thing that helped with my dad was respecting his reliance on muscle
memory. I moved back home for a year during my divorce with my two special
needs sons in tow. My oldest son had a lot of memory issues when he was little
and had also been very reliant on muscle memory -- basically, habit. He had an
intuitive understanding of how to relate to his grandfather and we set some
precedents in how we interacted with him that helped other family members cope
better with the situation.

One precedent we set was just leaving food at his place at the table. No one
else ever sat there and that had been true for many years. It was HIS place
and only HIS. So if he saw food there, he assumed it was and he could decide
whether or not he wished to eat it. This returned some control over his life
to him and reduced the fighting about trying to get him fed. Other family
members soon followed suit, just leaving food at dad's place at the table and
letting him discover it and make decisions about it on a time table that
worked for him, without having to fight with him about food anymore.

Memory is a fascinating and multi-faceted part of human cognition.

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ChuckMcM
My wife arranged for a person to come to her uncle's nursing home once a week
to play music for him. He suffers from fairly severe dementia, but during
these sessions he relaxes and "lights up", its the best thing in the world for
him. It is a great way to bring joy to someone.

~~~
mikewhy
I used to do Rec Therapy at a home for people with dementia and started
playing some old folk songs for them after reading how music can help. It
really does seem to bring them back.

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mhkool
I just added a comment to the original article: To help those who suffer from
Alzheimer, I suggest to read an article by Dr Bredesen. In a small study his
team has greatly improved the conditions of Alzheimer patients (e.g "not being
able to work" to "back to work") with 9 out of 10 patients. The results are so
impressive, that the same team is now doing a new study with 35 patients. Read
his article here:
[http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html](http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html)

------
roberthahn
Two questions come to mind after reading that article:

1\. Suppose I composed and memorized songs about my loved ones, and years from
now began to suffer from Alzheimer's - would those songs help me remember who
they are?

2\. Suppose I taught someone just diagnosed with Alzheimer's a song. Will they
continue to remember it as the disease progressively got worse?

This is an amazing discovery - I hope they continue to follow up on their
work.

~~~
goodJobWalrus
answer to your second q is no:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-last-day-
of-h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-last-day-of-her-
life.html)

(long article but worth a read)

------
covercash
There was a recent documentary about this subject:
[http://www.aliveinside.us/](http://www.aliveinside.us/)

------
vanderZwan
> _Furthermore, our results support the idea that music is remembered
> implicitly, akin to remembering a complex series of movements, rather than
> as a discrete entity or specific countable events._

Iain McGilchrist will be pleased, as this appears to suggest music predates
language. I quote from his book "The Master and His Emissary," a very thought-
provoking book (although he overreaches quite a bit at times) in which one of
his main theses is that we do not give the implicit parts of our brain enough
credit:

> _Fairly obviously, one might think, language must have developed for
> communication. But that is not as obvious as it seems. Some 300-400,000
> years ago or longer, homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of homo
> sapiens and homo neanderthalensis, had a large brain and a vocal apparatus
> comparable to those of modern humans, and, although we cannot be sure of the
> earliest dates such features arose, it may well have been as long ago as
> about half a million years. However, the evidence suggests that we did not
> develop the degree of sophisticated symbol manipulation that language
> requires until a much later point, possibly as little as 40,000 years ago,
> but at any rate not earlier than a mere 80,000 years ago, when the first
> cultural artefacts, along with evidence of visual representation, suddenly
> and profusely arise, and humans began to adopt ritualised burial of the
> dead._

> _It would seem, then, that for most of human history, despite a large brain
> and presumably high intelligence, they managed to communicate satisfactory
> without language as we understand it. Admittedly they were not civilised in
> the true meaning of the word. But they survived and thrived as social
> animals, living in groups. How did our ancestors communicate adequately, if
> not by language?_

> _When did humans develop these capacities? Some ingenious observations allow
> a reliable inference to be made.In order to reach the tongue, the nerve
> which supplies it, the hypoglossal nerve, has to pass through an opening in
> the base of the skull, called the anterior condylar canal. The amount of
> work a nerve has to do is reflected in its size; in turn the size of the
> hole through which it passes indicates the size of the nerve. So by
> measuring the size of the canal in the base of the skull, we can get a very
> good idea of how much articulatory work the tongue of the skull 's 'owner'
> had to do._

> _We know that spoken language is dependent, not only on sufficient brain
> space to house the dictionary and grammar, but on quite specific features of
> the vocal apparatus (not just the vocal cords, but the articulatory bits and
> pieces of the tongue and mouth) enabling us to articulate a wide range of
> sounds, as well as on a remarkable degree of respiratory control, allowing
> us to sustain long, fluent, articulated phrases and to modulate intonation
> subtly over the length of a single breath._

> _But, and here is the thought-provoking oddity, examination of the earliest
> human skeletons, from long before the time we believe language arose,
> reveals canal sizes almost indistinguishable from those of modern humans.
> Why is that? The most likely answer is a surprise, and requires a bit of a
> frame shift for most of us. For the explanation of this sophisticated
> control and modulation of the production of sound, in the absence of
> language as we know it, has to be that it was for a sort of non-verbal
> language, one in which there was intonation and phrasing, but no actual
> words: and what is that, if not music?_

