The Cellar - Can music offer the key to treating dementia?

This is an interesting question, created by current brain studies. The studies explain why people are so drawn to music even if it's just rhythm sticks.

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Woody Geist started to show signs of Alzheimers at the age of 67. By the time he was 80, plaques had invaded large areas of his brain. His memory was so limited he could remember little about his life, and nothing about what to do with a tube of toothpaste.

All of which made it all the more remarkable that he could remember the baritone part to almost every song he had ever sung. For more than 40 years, he had been part of a successful 12-man a cappella singing group, the Grunyons. At the age of 80, he couldn't find his way to the stage to give a performance, but once he was up there in front of an audience he was he pitch perfect; and when he sang, he came alive. No one watching was in any doubt that not only could Woody sing the notes, he could also convey the feeling and meaning of the songs.

Woody Geist's story, told by Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia, is not an isolated case. In most cases of dementia, regardless of whether or not people have had musical training, they retain their capacity to sing, play, whistle, tap, click, clap, drum and dance long after much of the rest of their cognitive apparatus is deeply compromised. Music is often the very last thing to go, especially the embodied memory of music to which people dance or tap out a rhythm. Music anchors patients, Sacks says, in a way that nothing else can, reconnecting them to that sense of self which is in danger of slipping through their fingers. So it can also connect them to other people from whom they often feel estranged.