Alzheimer's Disease and Musical Memory
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One of the most fascinating things was that his ability to play music was the last thing to go. He'd be on stage performing, unable to even remember his children's names (or that they were his children) when introducing the band, but he'd then shred up a storm on the guitar. He'd sing songs he made famous back in the 1960s, with a teleprompter to keep the lyrics going. But he could play music!
Another interesting side of the documentary was how he used his tremendous personal charm and charisma to get around the failings of his memory and thinking. If he couldn't answer a question, he'd turn it into a joke or change the subject, easily leading even professionals off the scent. On the other hand, the movie followed his most personal interactions, the near-violent outbursts with his wife and closest friends that only got worse as the dementia wore on.
Fascinating documentary. I highly recommend it if you're into this subject.
My dad did that kind of thing as his memory went. I think it is self preservation. It is really dangerous to let people know how impaired you are.
One thing that helped with my dad was respecting his reliance on muscle memory. I moved back home for a year during my divorce with my two special needs sons in tow. My oldest son had a lot of memory issues when he was little and had also been very reliant on muscle memory -- basically, habit. He had an intuitive understanding of how to relate to his grandfather and we set some precedents in how we interacted with him that helped other family members cope better with the situation.
One precedent we set was just leaving food at his place at the table. No one else ever sat there and that had been true for many years. It was HIS place and only HIS. So if he saw food there, he assumed it was and he could decide whether or not he wished to eat it. This returned some control over his life to him and reduced the fighting about trying to get him fed. Other family members soon followed suit, just leaving food at dad's place at the table and letting him discover it and make decisions about it on a time table that worked for him, without having to fight with him about food anymore.
Memory is a fascinating and multi-faceted part of human cognition.
1. Suppose I composed and memorized songs about my loved ones, and years from now began to suffer from Alzheimer's - would those songs help me remember who they are?
2. Suppose I taught someone just diagnosed with Alzheimer's a song. Will they continue to remember it as the disease progressively got worse?
This is an amazing discovery - I hope they continue to follow up on their work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-last-day-of-h...
(long article but worth a read)
Iain McGilchrist will be pleased, as this appears to suggest music predates language. I quote from his book "The Master and His Emissary," a very thought-provoking book (although he overreaches quite a bit at times) in which one of his main theses is that we do not give the implicit parts of our brain enough credit:
> Fairly obviously, one might think, language must have developed for communication. But that is not as obvious as it seems. Some 300-400,000 years ago or longer, homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis, had a large brain and a vocal apparatus comparable to those of modern humans, and, although we cannot be sure of the earliest dates such features arose, it may well have been as long ago as about half a million years. However, the evidence suggests that we did not develop the degree of sophisticated symbol manipulation that language requires until a much later point, possibly as little as 40,000 years ago, but at any rate not earlier than a mere 80,000 years ago, when the first cultural artefacts, along with evidence of visual representation, suddenly and profusely arise, and humans began to adopt ritualised burial of the dead.
> It would seem, then, that for most of human history, despite a large brain and presumably high intelligence, they managed to communicate satisfactory without language as we understand it. Admittedly they were not civilised in the true meaning of the word. But they survived and thrived as social animals, living in groups. How did our ancestors communicate adequately, if not by language?
> When did humans develop these capacities? Some ingenious observations allow a reliable inference to be made.In order to reach the tongue, the nerve which supplies it, the hypoglossal nerve, has to pass through an opening in the base of the skull, called the anterior condylar canal. The amount of work a nerve has to do is reflected in its size; in turn the size of the hole through which it passes indicates the size of the nerve. So by measuring the size of the canal in the base of the skull, we can get a very good idea of how much articulatory work the tongue of the skull's 'owner' had to do.
> We know that spoken language is dependent, not only on sufficient brain space to house the dictionary and grammar, but on quite specific features of the vocal apparatus (not just the vocal cords, but the articulatory bits and pieces of the tongue and mouth) enabling us to articulate a wide range of sounds, as well as on a remarkable degree of respiratory control, allowing us to sustain long, fluent, articulated phrases and to modulate intonation subtly over the length of a single breath.
> But, and here is the thought-provoking oddity, examination of the earliest human skeletons, from long before the time we believe language arose, reveals canal sizes almost indistinguishable from those of modern humans. Why is that? The most likely answer is a surprise, and requires a bit of a frame shift for most of us. For the explanation of this sophisticated control and modulation of the production of sound, in the absence of language as we know it, has to be that it was for a sort of non-verbal language, one in which there was intonation and phrasing, but no actual words: and what is that, if not music?