How writing songs could help you ward off dementia

From healing trauma to improving emotional function, the benefits of music therapy are profound. Now, new breakthrough research out of the University of Melbourne is suggesting that song writing could play an incredible role in helping dementia patients retain memories.

To date, there’s been a commonly held belief that once a person has dementia their capacity to learn new things dissolves. Though according to a team of Aussie researchers, when people suffering from early and mid-stage dementia are encouraged to dream up lyrics to music they’re still able to recall the words a week later. While using music to engage dementia patients isn’t exactly a new concept, the fact that they were able to recall their unique lyrics from one week to the next is especially exciting.

So how did the team manage to find the link? Led by Felicity Baker, eight adults with dementia engaged in group song writing sessions one a week. As well as the sheer pleasure of making music, staff at the dementia care centre reported that the participants appeared to become chattier, happier and more engaged outside the sessions.

77-year-old Leonie Fitzgerald was one of the test patients and was left with a skeleton vocabulary of just four or five words following a stroke. The project empowered her with the ability to not only express herself but also start to remember the lyrics and melodies to her songs.

“One of the things that everybody thinks they know about dementia is that people with dementia can’t learn anything new,” explains Felicity. “But we watched these people learn the songs and the words. You could see the songs were familiar, once the first couple of chords were played.”

The results are so promising that Felicity and her team have scored a $24,000 grant that will allow them to conduct parallel research in Germany and determine whether the positive results are cross-cultural. Exciting stuff.

Beyond helping dementia patients retain memories, there’s evidence that cognitive exercises like song writing could help to ward off the onset. Writing songs and memorising lyrics offers your brain a similar workout to learning a new language, which is shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s by up to 4 years. While the evidence isn’t hard and fast, it makes sense that keeping your brain stimulated could help to prevent the onset of diseases like Alzheimer’s. Further research shows that regular brain exercises can help to delay memory loss, whether it’s playing board games with the grandkids, working on a crossword or writing your own songs.

Do you believe in the power of cognitive exercise? We’d love to hear your experiences so feel free to share in the comments box below.