Viral video of ballerina with Alzheimer's shows vital role of music in memo

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We see a frail and elderly woman in a chair, her eyes downcast. She motions for the music to be turned up, a swelling melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and with a little encouragement her hands begin to flutter.

The woman in the film is Marta Cinta González Saldaña, a former ballet dancer who died in 2019, the year the video was shot. But the clip has gone viral since being posted recently by Spanish organisation Música Para Despertar (Music to Awaken), which promotes the value of music for those living with Alzheimer’s.

Auditory memory may be the last thing to leave us because it’s one of the first things we develop, at around 18 weeks in the womb, says Grace Meadows, programme director at Music for Dementia.

“They’re some of the deepest neural pathways that get laid down,” she says. Our first language, the babbling and cooing of babies and their carers, is a form of musical exchange. “That’s why it’s so deep and why we’re so responsive to it, because it’s so primal.”

That remains true when people have cognitive impairments, partly because music is processed in so many different parts of the brain. If there’s something blocking its neural pathway, it finds another path. And music from formative stages in our lives tends to have the strongest hold, especially around the teenage years and 20s, the “memory bump” as it’s called, when so many intense social bonds and new emotions and experiences take place: first loves, moving to new cities, or perhaps dancing your first leading role on stage.

For Saldaña, a strong muscle memory is tied to those musical instincts, but you don’t have to have been a professional dancer for music to spark a physical response.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/nov/13/viral-video-of-ballerina-with-alzheimers-shows-vital-role-of-music-in-memory