Carol Rosenstein was watching her husband, Irwin, slip away inch by inch. At one time he had been a brilliant lawyer, a lover of Broadway musicals, a world traveler. But after his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2006, he developed dementia, and slowly everything changed. His gait flattened to a shuffle. The sparkle in his eyes turned into a blank stare. His mood soured. Worsening matters, the medications he took caused hallucinations and extreme agitation. As communication grew more challenging, Carol felt between them growing.
Then, in 2014, something happened. Irwin, who had been a gifted pianist since childhood, sat down at the piano and began to play. As his fingers floated through American classics like “Fly Me to the Moon,” “What a Wonderful World,” and “Try to Remember,”
Carol saw his posture straighten. The sparkle returned to his eyes. The husband she once knew came back, bit by bit, if only briefly. “I could see this human being resurrect and start to reconnect with his environment,” she says, “just like I had given him a dose of medication.”
Mystified, she called his neurologist and asked what was happening. “He said, ‘Carol, you are watching the power of music, changing brain chemistry.’”
While it’s tempting to search for a woo-woo reason why music resonates with us so deeply, it’s not necessary.
For people like Concetta Tomaino, the effects can be explained by science and logic — even if there’s still a lot to learn. “I think I went past that magical, mysterious piece a long time ago,” she laughs.
Tomaino spent decades as a music therapist, pursuing evidence-based research around music and the brain before volumes of such literature existed.
In 1980, she began working at Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Center) in the Bronx, New York, where she first met the consulting neurologist Oliver Sacks.
By then Sacks had already written Awakenings, an autobiographical book (and later a movie) about a group of encephalitis lethargica patients frozen in trancelike states, whom he “awakened” using a new drug, along with music.
Like Tomaino, Sacks was extremely interested in understanding more about the potential impact of music on patients. In 1995, the two co-founded the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, where Tomaino remains the executive director, to better understand the ways that music helps people with neurological problems to move better and remember more.
Because of that, when we hear those old, meaningful tunes even a half-century later, they stimulate multiple areas and networks of the brain — including areas that are relatively unharmed by a disease like dementia — and those long-ago memories resurface.
That’s why a person with memory impairment may not recall their daughter’s name but may remember all the lyrics to her favorite lullaby.
“It’s pulling from emotions, it’s pulling from feelings, it’s pulling from interpersonal associations, it’s pulling from a date or time or period of one’s life — historical things,” Tomaino says.
Music serves as a clue, coaxing the brain to fill in the blanks.
More on the story of Melodies and Memories
Music and Memory is a site full of resources and information on music and aging.
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