Music seems to hold a promise for people suffering from dementia, for a new study has found that Alzheimer’s patients could improve memory by just listening to their favorite songs.

An international team has found that people suffering from Alzheimer’s can slow the relentless course of the disease by tuning into their favorite songs, the latest issue of the Cerebral Cortex journal reports.

According to researchers, listening to certain tunes from one’s past evokes powerful and vivid memories that appear to be immune from the condition. And, by making a “soundtrack of someone’s life” before their mind is damaged and playing it back to them “could help form a resistance to the disease”.

“Providing patients with MP3 players and customized playlists could prove to be a quality-of-life improvement strategy that would be both effective and economical. What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head.

“It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye. Now, we can see the association between those two things — the music and the memories,” Petr Janata, who led the team, was quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying.

Janata of California University and colleagues came to the conclusion after analyzing the brain activity of 13 students as they listened to 30 favorite songs.

They found that the section of the brain associated with music is also associated with humans' most vivid memories and this region seemed to serve as a hub that links familiar music, memories and emotion.

In fact, this pre-frontal cortex, which is just behind the forehead, seems to be the most immune from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, the study revealed.

“Because memory for autobiographically important music seems to be spared in people with Alzheimer’s disease, one of the long-term goals is to use this research to help develop music-based therapy for people with the disease,” he says.

Source: The Times of India