The brains of older adults feel a sense of reward when listening to music, even if it鈥檚 a song they don鈥檛 particularly like, a researcher at British Columbia鈥檚 Simon Fraser University says.
Sarah Faber said her work on how healthy brains respond to music as they age creates a baseline for future research on people who have Alzheimer鈥檚 or dementia to better understand those diseases.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a lot of interest in how to predict who might be going to develop dementia or Alzheimer鈥檚 disease and then once people do develop Alzheimer鈥檚 and dementia, who is going to respond to treatment and what kind of treatment,鈥� she said.
鈥淭he brain is fascinating, but it doesn鈥檛 exist in a jar. It鈥檚 attached to a body, that鈥檚 attached to an environment, and community, and a social structure.鈥�
The research published in the journal Network Neuroscience featured 80 participants, including university students and people as old as 90, who took functional MRI scans.
The younger group of adults had an average age of 19, while the other group had an average age of 67.
Everyone listened to 24 samples, including songs they selected themselves, popular music intentionally chosen by researchers and songs composed specifically for the study.
Faber said they found reward sections of the brain were activated in younger adults while they listened to music they liked or were familiar with, but older adults showed the same area being stimulated even when the music was new to them, or they didn鈥檛 like it.
鈥淭here wasn鈥檛 this gatekeeping functionality that we see in younger adults with their auditory network kind of being like, 鈥極K, well, if we like this, we get rewards. But if we don鈥檛 like this, we don鈥檛 get rewards,鈥欌�� she said.
鈥淲hereas for older adults, it was just like, 鈥楳usic! Reward! Yes!鈥欌��
Faber, who was a music therapist before becoming a neuroscientist, said research into people with Alzheimer鈥檚 can be challenging if someone is unable to speak, or explain what they are thinking or feeling in a moment.
She said anything they can learn about how to make the music therapies more effective would be helpful, but the benefits go beyond that.
鈥淛ust understanding 鈥� how the brain deals with complex stimuli, through Alzheimer鈥檚, that would be a really good and a very useful bunch of information to get for people that are working in Alzheimer鈥檚, not necessarily just in music,鈥� Faber said.
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