Beneficial effect of music on memory?

In the absence of effective treatments to counteract cognitive impairment, background music has traditionally been proposed as a candidate therapeutic alternative to improve memory tasks. Its effect has been under discussion for some time, but it has now been seen that this relationship may be conditioned by new interindividual parameters and, therefore, be more complex than expected.

This is indicated by a study led by Marco Calabria, a researcher in the Cognitive Neurolab group of Health Sciences Studies at the Open University of Catalonia (Open University of Catalonia, UOC).

The first results of the study Effect Mozart and memory in patients with cognitive impairment, point out that listening to classical music in the background while doing memory exercises does not improve or worsen the learning level of people with mild cognitive impairment. On the other hand, it has also been seen that listening to more activating music could have a positive effect on people who are accustomed to using music as an emotional regulator in their daily lives, a fact that opens up the possibility of new hypotheses and research.

The study has been carried out with patients from the Neuropsychology Unit of the Hospital de Sant Pau and has had the collaboration of researchers from this Barcelona hospital, the Concordia University in Canada and the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute in Madrid, in Spain.

“We have not found a general repercussion on the effect of music in the sense that it favors or impairs learning in cases of mild cognitive impairment, but we have seen that this would be individually modulated. If people habitually use music as an emotional regulator in their daily life, for example, to be calmer or to keep them company, it will be easier for them to get a new benefit from music when they have to do new learning”, explains Marco Calabria, doctor in psychobiology.

Listening to activating music could have a positive effect on memory in people who have used it in the past as an emotional regulator. (Illustration: Amazings/NCYT)

The study has been carried out with people with mild cognitive impairment of the amnesic type, that is to say, who have memory problems due to the effect of a neurodegeneration principle that is more specific in the parts of the brain where aspects of learning and memory are worked on. The experiments consisted of observing twenty-four photographs of human faces with the instruction to memorize them and, ten minutes later, reviewing a new series of images with the previous twenty-four and twenty-four new ones to try to identify those that had already been seen before.

The first test was done listening to classical music in the information consolidation phase, but not in the recovery phase, while in the second exercise it was repeated with the auditory stimulus in both. However, regarding the results, no significant differences were found.

In these exercises, classical music is used because “it is a type of music that is characterized by being between relaxing and activating and has proven to be the most effective for enhancing memory.” On the other hand, the fact that it does not have a letter makes it possible to reduce the interference that verbal information can produce about the content that the participants must learn in the memory task.

However, the Calabria team wanted to do a third experiment with popular music that was considered more activating than not relaxing and, after a previous study, an instrumental version of Un rayo de sol, by Los Diablos, was chosen. And it was in this experiment that the results suggested that “the use of music as a strategy for mood regulation is associated with better memory performance,” according to the UOC researcher.

This finding opens the door for more research to continue exploring the role of interindividual preferences and attitudes towards music in patients with mild cognitive impairment. The group plans to continue with the project until the end of 2024.

During this time, we will investigate whether background music could be more useful in other cognitive domains, for example, attention and concentration in patients with Parkinson’s disease. In addition, new infrared spectroscopy equipment set up in the Neuro Lab, one of the recently inaugurated UOC laboratories, will be used during the experiments, which will make it possible to see activation in the brain while cognitive processes are being carried out. This will help determine if, regardless of the level of response to music, there are alterations in brain modulation or not, in which areas, and if it depends on the type of person studied.

All of this would help to find some kind of marker to determine the people most likely to benefit from music in cognitive tasks. “The more we know how background music shapes cognitive processes, the better we can use it as a therapeutic tool in cognitive stimulation,” concludes Calabria, an expert in the study of cognitive processes and professor on the UOC’s master’s degree in Neuropsychology.

The study is titled “Background Music and Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment: The Role of Interindividual Differences.” And it has been published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. (Source: UOC)