In 2020 an incredible video went viral. It featured a former ballet dancer named Marta Cinta González Saldaña, suffering from severe Alzheimer’s disease in her senior years. In the video, Saldaña listens to a piece of music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and suddenly flashes awake beginning to move to a dance routine she presumably rehearsed over and over in her younger days.
These types of clips have been shared for years, and they highlight the stunning way music can rekindle dormant neural pathways in elderly subjects experiencing serious forms of dementia. And while music therapy is now a common practice in nursing homes, little research has actually zoomed in on the neural mechanisms behind the phenomena, or in particular, what kinds of music could optimize the potential brain benefits.
Editor's note: Readers often ask us for follow-ups on memorable stories. What has happened to this story over the years? This piece was originally published in 2022 but has been re-edited and updated with new information current as of Feb 18, 2025. Enjoy!
A 2022 study, led by Psyche Loui from Northeastern University’s Music Imaging and Neural Dynamics Lab, answered two specific questions in regards to this incredible music-triggered phenomenon. How does a controlled eight-week music therapy program influence the activity and connectivity between auditory and reward areas of the brain? And, are the beneficial effects of music amplified when the music is self-selected, focusing on songs that are particularly meaningful to an individual?
To investigate, the research team recruited a small cohort of cognitively healthy older adults. In conjunction with a music therapist, each volunteer created two playlists of music – one dubbed “energizing” and the other “relaxing.”
The cohort was tasked with listening to music from their self-selected playlists for one-hour every day, over the course of eight weeks. The one-hour daily music experience was designed to be focused, so each subject was asked to pay attention to their moods, emotions, and memories while listening to their playlists. This wasn't merely playing tunes in the background while doing daily chores.
At the beginning and end of the study, each participant also took part in a brain imaging test where they listened to 24 different audio excerpts. Six of those excepts were self-selected by the participant, while the rest were other pieces of music spanning many different genres selected by the researchers.
In a conversation with New Atlas in 2022, Loui explained how her team's findings revealed the eight-week music intervention did result in increased connectivity across some key brain regions.
“We saw changes in auditory connectivity to the reward system, specifically the connectivity between the auditory network and the medial prefrontal cortex (which is part of the reward system) was increased after intervention,” Loui noted. “We also saw that the right executive control network, which includes regions that are important for attention and executive function, became more accurate at representing music after the intervention.”
According to Loui, this study was the first time a music-based intervention had been shown to cause longitudinal improvements in connectivity between these particular brain networks. From a clinical standpoint these findings are exciting, as decreased connectivity and activity in the medial prefrontal cortex is seen in a number of neurodegenerative conditions, as well as psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and depression.
First finding: auditory and reward systems really like self-selected music! Music that was rated as loved, and as very familiar, were also good at engaging these same regions 6/ pic.twitter.com/AGylad72t6
— Psyche Loui (@psycheloui) July 8, 2022
The other major finding in the study was that self-selected music was much more effective at engaging these brain pathways, compared to other kinds of more unfamiliar music. Loui also added, the most effective self-selected music seemed to be songs linked to a participant’s younger years.
“… we had participants listen to about one third self-selected music, and two-thirds researcher-selected music, while getting their brains scanned, so that we could compare brain activity between self-selected and other-selected music, [and] we found that self-selected music was much more effective at engaging the brain,” Loui explained in 2022. “The most effective music tends to be from adolescent and early adulthood for the participant.”
The finding that the most effective music for rekindling neural pathways in older age is what was listened to in one’s youth interestingly recalls a large body of study illustrating how music and cultural taste is fundamentally formed in a person’s teenage years. Film theorist David Bordwell once referred to this phenomena as “the law of the adolescent window,” and these brain imaging findings certainly affirm that certain neural pathways linked to cultural experiences are really locked down in these key formative years.
“Between the ages of 13 and 18, a window opens for each of us,” Bordwell wrote. “The cultural pastimes that attract us then, the ones we find ourselves drawn to and even obsessive about, will always have a powerful hold. We may broaden our tastes as we grow out of those years – we should, anyhow – but the sports, hobbies, books, TV, movies, and music that we loved then we will always love.”
A key takeaway from the 2022 study is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all strategy to music therapy, Loui pointed out. So listening to music you like is important, but what this study could not answer is exactly how clinically effective music therapy may be as treatment for patients with dementia.
... music is an access key to your memory, your pre-frontal cortex
A study published in 2021 from researchers at the University of Toronto explored a similar intervention to Loui’s work, but in Alzheimer’s patients with very early-stage cognitive decline. It was a small study, and compared the effect between musicians and non-musicians of three-weeks of daily hour-long listening sessions with familiar music.
While brain activity was slightly different in those participants with a history of playing music, there were distinct signs of cognitive improvement in both groups after three weeks of music therapy. Senior author on the study Michael Thaut said listening to familiar music in one’s senior years could be thought of as a kind of brain gym.
“Whether you’re a lifelong musician or have never even played an instrument, music is an access key to your memory, your pre-frontal cortex,” Thaut said. “It’s simple: keep listening to the music that you’ve loved all your life. Your all-time favorite songs, those pieces that are especially meaningful to you. Make that your brain gym.”
More recently, a couple of researchers from USC really homed in on what happens in the brain when one listens to nostalgic music. They scanned a number of people's brains in an MRI machine while they listened music they loved, and Sarah Hennessy, one of the researchers, called the results "amazing."
“When you hear nostalgic music, there’s activity all over your brain, but most notably in the default mode network, which is normally active when we’re daydreaming,” Hennessy said in 2024. “It is also active when we’re thinking about our own narrative. We also have activity in some visual areas that normally process what you see in front of you. But all these participants had their eyes closed. So, what might be happening is that participants are visualizing what was in front of them during the memory the song evoked.”
Loui's latest study, published in October 2024, looked closely at how music can help people focus on certain tasks. She found certain types of music can help people with attention difficulties zoom in on a project. Fast music with no lyrics, she suggested, helps focus the brain's natural rhythmic activity.
“The brain actually oscillates at certain frequencies,” she said recently. “If you insert those frequencies into the music, that might influence your activity in those same frequencies in the brain — we saw that the brain was very clearly ‘phase locking,’ or [working] in time to these amplitude modulations that were inserted in the music.
The 2022 study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
A version of this article was originally published in 2022.
