Music helps to highlight areas of brain affected by aging

Scientists led by a team at the University of Oxford and Aarhus University in Denmark found found that when older people listened to memorised music, sensory-related areas of the brain appeared to be extra active, potentially compensating for a reduced function of other key brain regions typically involved in memory processes.

Meanwhile, when older people listened to music they had not heard before, key parts of their brain involved in memory processes responded less than younger people’s, except for the sensory-related regions.

Published in Communications Biology, the study of 39 older adults and 37 younger adults, the results showed:

• When recalling the memorised sequences, there was no difference in older people’s ability to remember the music.
• However, different parts of their brain were functioning in different ways to the younger group, with increased activity in sensory regions such as left auditory cortex but decreased functioning in the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal regions, which are responsible for memory processing. This suggest the sensory regions were working hard to compensate for the reduced response of those areas.
• When listening to new musical sequences they had not heard before, the older group’s brains worked less in higher-order brain regions such as the hippocampus, ventromedial prefrontal and inferior temporal cortices, which are responsible for memory, planning and evaluation, but there was no difference in the auditory cortex.

The researchers say music is an innovative and valuable way of improving understanding of how memory and the brain works, and could have implications for the screening of older people at risk of developing dementia.

Dr Leonardo Bonetti, Junior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Associate Professor at the Centre for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University in Denmark, led the study. He said:

“Music is a great tool to help understand how the brain changes its functional organisation to support memory as we age.

This shows that changes in brain functionality do not necessarily lead to pathological conditions. Aging is not just about having a brain that gets worse, but having a brain that changes to adapt to challenges and compensates for mechanisms that become less effective.”

He added:

“We now need further research  to understand how the healthy brain changes its functionality over a longer period. By following older people over the years in a longitudinal study, we might see how brain functional changes predict the probability of individual older adults developing dementia, which could have great implications for screening procedures.”

The study involved participants being played both new and memorised musical sequences inspired by the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach.

They then used MRI scans to compare what happened in different parts of participants’ brains according to whether they were young adults (aged 18-25) or older adults (aged over 60).

The paper follows an earlier study published in Nature Communications led by Dr Bonetti which also used music to understand how the brain remember and predicts musical sequences.