Musical memories don’t fade with age
An 80-year-old can identify familiar songs just as well as a teenager.
Musical memories are emotionally charged and deeply embedded in our memory, which may help resist age-related cognitive decline.
The ability to remember and recognize musical themes, unlike many other types of memory, does not appear to be affected by age.
“You’ll often hear anecdotes about people with severe Alzheimer’s who can’t speak or recognise others, but who still sing songs they sang as children or play the piano,” says Sarah Sauve, a feminist music scientist now at the University of Lincoln in the UK.
Previous studies have shown that many aspects of memory are affected by aging, such as recall tasks that require real-time processing, but recognition tasks that rely on well-known information or automatic processes are not. The effect of aging on the ability to recall music has also been investigated, but Sauve was interested in investigating this effect in a real-world setting, such as a concert.
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In her study published today, PLoS OneShe tested how well about 90 healthy adults, ages 18 to 86, recognized familiar and unfamiliar musical themes from a live concert. The participants were recruited at a Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra performance in St. John’s, Canada; another 31 watched a recording of the concert in a lab.
The study focused on three songs performed at the concert. A Night of Love They played a Mozart piece that the researchers assumed most participants would be familiar with, as well as two specially commissioned experimental pieces. One was tonal and easy to listen to, while the other was more atonal and didn’t follow typical melodic norms of Western classical music. A short melodic phrase from each of the three pieces was played three times at the beginning of the piece, and participants recorded the number of times they recognized the theme in the piece.
Melodic phrases are A Night of Love Recognition was equally good across all ages and musical backgrounds, and there was no decline in recognition with age. All participants became less confident in recognizing themes in unfamiliar tonal pieces, and even less confident in recognizing themes in unfamiliar atonal pieces. This pattern also did not vary with age. The study also found no age-related differences between the results of concert participants and lab participants.
Stephen Harf, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sydney in Australia, says the reason musical memories seem to resist age-related cognitive decline may be because they have to do with the emotions that music evokes in people, which become deeply imprinted in our memories. “We know from memory research in general that the amygdala, or emotional processing, essentially acts as a kind of imprint of salience,” Harf says.
Because music tends to follow certain rules, “it’s relatively easy to guess pretty accurately what happened in between,” Harf says.
The study had limited data on cognitive function in some participants, so it doesn’t provide detailed insight into how cognitive impairment or neurodegenerative disease affects memory recall. But there’s great interest in using music as a form of “cognitive scaffolding” — an aid to remembering other information — for people with dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases, Harf says.
This article is reprinted with permission. First Edition July 24, 2024.
