admin When older people listen to music, their brains are claimed to feel a sense of reward when doing so, even though they claim that they do not like it, according to a researcher at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University.
Sarah Faber has claimed that her work on how healthy brains react to music as they grow old creates a baseline for the future research on people who are suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia in order to better understand that disease.
“There’s a lot of interest in how to predict who might be going to develop dementia or Alzheimer’s disease and then once people do develop Alzheimer’s and dementia, who is going to respond to treatment and what kind of treatment,” she said.
“The brain is fascinating, but it doesn’t exist in a jar. It’s attached to a body, that’s attached to an environment, a community, and a social structure.”
The study, highlighted in the journal Network Neuroscience, involved 80 participants spanning from university students to people who were around 90 years old. Where, all of them went under the same functional MRI scans. The younger cohort was around 19 years old and contrasted with an average age of 67 for the older group.
Each participant listened to a total of 24 samples, comprising self-selected songs, researcher-selected popular music, and study-specific compositions.
“There wasn’t this gatekeeping functionality that we see in younger adults with their auditory network kind of being like, ‘OK, well, if we like this, we get rewards. But if we don’t like this, we don’t get rewards,’” she said.
“Whereas for older adults, it was just like, ‘Music! Reward! Yes!’”
Faber, who used to work as a music therapist prior to becoming a neuroscientist, said research into people with Alzheimer’s can be tough if some individual is unable to speak or elaborate on what they are thinking or feeling in the moment.
She added that anything they can learn about how to make the music therapies more useful would be welcomed but the benefits go beyond that.
“Just understanding … how the brain deals with complex stimuli, through Alzheimer’s, that would be a really good and a very useful bunch of information to get for people that are working in Alzheimer’s, not necessarily just in music,” Faber said.
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