Ole Bull playing the violin, photographic positive, business card circa 1862; artist: Georg E. Hansen (1833-181) (Public domain) — Ole Bull playing the violin, photographic positive, business card circa 1862; artist: Georg E. Hansen (1833-1891) (Public domain)

A recent research study titled Age and familiarity effects on musical memory revealed some encouraging findings. The study by Sarah Sauvé at the University of Lincoln in the UK was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“You’ll hear anecdotes all the time of how people with severe Alzheimer’s can’t speak, can’t recognize people, but will sing the songs of their childhood or play the piano,” comments Sarah Sauvé of the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom in Nature magazine. It’s a phenomenon she wanted to examine.

As the paper notes, memory troubles are a common complaint among older adults, and previous research has identified certain criteria that seems to identify which memory-related tasks are affected by aging and which are not.

Tasks which involve recognition of familiar elements and well-known information tend to remain automatic, and unaffected by aging;
Our ability to remember more complex tasks, which involve recalling diverse elements, and collecting and retaining new information, tend to decline as we age.

The Study

Based on prior research into memory and music, the paper posits a hypothesis: that cognitive abilities decline as we age, but when we’re familiar with the musical task, our abilities remain essentially the same. In other words, experience and familiarity make the difference.

While the researchers were based in the UK, the study used a performance by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra in St. John’s (Canada) to test their theory.

About 90 people between the ages of 18 and 86 experienced the performance live, and another 31 in a lab setting.
The participants listened to three target themes: Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and two pieces commissioned specially for the study, one tonal and one atonal. They heard each theme three times before the performance.
They listened to the concert live, or in a lab setting (of the same performance).
As they listened, they were to press a button, or the spacebar, when they heard the target theme(s).

Cognitive tests, and a questionnaire indicating demographic information, were added to the test results.

Results

The results revealed trends along various parameters.

Participants scored higher for accuracy when listening live vs. listening in a laboratory setting.
They scored highest for the familiar Mozart piece (tonal); middling for the new piece that was tonal, and worst for the unfamiliar piece that was atonal.
Age and prior musical training had no bearing on their recognition performance — familiarity was the key ingredient.

The paper calls the evidence “encouraging” that music, with its diverse connections to cognition and memory, provides a kind of solid framework that withstands the effects of time.

Steffen Herff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, Australia, spoke to Nature about the possibility that emotional connections to the music helped to solidify their place in our memory. “We know from general memory research that, effectively, the amygdala — or emotional processing — operates a little bit like an importance stamp,” he says.

Why is it important?

The study offers a better glimpse into the way memory operates, and in practical terms, a possible tool for therapists.

As the paper’s author Sarah Sauvé noted, there is already anecdotal evidence that musical memory can withstand the harmful effects of neurodegenerative disease. The study offers more proof.

The concept of “cognitive scaffolding” means essentially using an aid that improves learning or memory, and if music is indeed largely immune, then it may be used as such a tool to help people with conditions such as dementia which impair memory.