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1. Music and Cognition

Last modified by Demi Tao on 2023/04/06 10:53

Music and cognition

As a person gets older, cognitive abilities tend to worsen:

  •     Working memory 
  •     Episodic memory
  •     Processing/psychomotor speed

The multiple predictors of this cognitive decline are:

  •     Age
  •     Medical health/biomarkers
  •     Experience/lifestyle

This deterioration comes in multiple forms and causes, mainly brain atrophy/neuronal loss, plaques or white matter lesions.

Some factors that reduce the effect of this deterioration are brain reserves and cognitive reserves:

  • Brain reserve (having more brain cells available) contributes to a higher resistance to the effects of dementia
  • Cognitive reserve is built throughout one's life, by exercising, keeping a healthy diet/routine and also proper cognitive weight on the brain (challenging one's self with work that puts your brain to work).

Dementia in itself is a "Major neurocognitive disorder", which is diagnosed commonly when a patient:

  • Has substantial decline in 1 or more cognitive domains
  • Has enough decline that it is sufficient to interfere with independent daily living
  • Can have or not have behavioral disturbance

Current pharmacological treatment is not very effective and can only delay some symptoms for maximum
one year.

Main goals of current treatments:

  1. Prevent excess disability (people taking too much responsibility away from the person with dementia
  2. Promoting functional improvement and self-sufficiency in patients daily life.
  3. Maintain QoL for both the patient and the family.

Interventions that have been applied to assist with cognition in dementia:

  • Repetition of tasks
  • Errorless learning
  • Reality orientation therapy (too confrontational)
  • Reminiscence therapy (good)

Stimulation only ever has had a small impact proven

  • Only useful for mild/moderate patients

Music is helpful but only for specific areas of the brain

Notes about music: 
The different areas of the brain dealing with music have different rates of degradation over time.

Music assists with emotional regulation, good emotional responses, alternative means of expression and social interaction.
It assists with attention placement, can distract from negative stimuli like pain, help with movement rehab.
It can also help with conditioning patients to handle their tasks/remind them of something connected to the music.

Notes about sensory stimulation:

It's useful and usually targets things like activation, engagements, communication and enriched environments.

Dementia often comes with changes in sensory experience.

These treatments however usually have no cognitive improvement or long term effects.

Possible uses of music in this project:

Mainly for conditioning, music can be used as a tune accompanying certain reminders to help transmit the same information to a patient without being too confrontational. Having a tune accompany commonly retrieved information can perhaps make it such that the patient will associate the tune with the information, needing less information to be repeated back to them on the common reminders as time goes on.

Another use could be for general emotional regulation when the patient is having a tough time on their own. This music could be played when the robot is idle or when playing the memory game.


References:

King, A. C., & Dwan, C. (2019). Electronic memory aids for people with dementia experiencing prospective memory loss: A review of empirical studies. Dementia, 18(6), 1994-2007