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A Virginia Senior Lining provider is reconnecting families and residents with dementia using a different hind of music program BY BERNIE CAVIS. JERRY LYNN OANIELS AND PAULA HADER
Neurologists and psychologists have studied the effects of music on the human brain since the 1990s. Early research illustrated how music can actually elicit memories and physical responses. However, it was not until 2009 when Dr. Petr Janata, PhD, then an associate professor of psychology at the University of California-Davis' Center for Mind and Brain, published a study entitled "The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories," that researchers began connecting the importance of music with Alzheimer's and dementia treatment.
Janata's study provided a road map for us at Commonwealth Senior Living. As one of the 50 largest senior living providers in the United States with over 1,400 residents, our goal with building a new program around music was to treat not only an individual's physical symptoms, but also his or her emotional ones.
To truly gain an appreciation for how music impacts a person's mind, Janata mapped the human brain activity of a group of individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He found a tremendous increase in brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex region when people experienced music. The medial prefrontal cortex is one of the last places affected by the atrophy associated with Alzheimer's and related dementias.
Later studies by Jane M. Flinn, PhD, associate professor of psychology at George Mason University, and Linda Maguire, a musician and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, took that research a step further. After a four-month study in several senior care communities, they concluded that music did increase brain activity but that the type of music played to individuals with Alzheimer's disease mattered.
Results from the study...