There’s something about music that almost forces people to respond instinctively to it. Whether hearing a beat makes you tap your foot, nod your head, or dance, music triggers the hard-wired part of our brains and makes us react....For More CONTINUE THE FULL READING▶▶
As people get older, music can have important cognitive, emotional, and psychological benefits. Please read on to check out what they are.
Mental Health
We have all felt how music can evoke strong positive emotions and lift your mood. According to a growing body of research, music lowers your body’s level of cortisol, a hormone that can add to feelings of anxiety or stress. Music also triggers chemical reactions in the brain, stimulating positive feelings.
Music can provide help for seniors living with dementia, as clinicians create a type of therapy using different styles and formats of music as a basis for improving how older adults feel. As much as you may appreciate how joyful and happy music can make us feel, it likely holds even more power than that.
Memory Improver
Have you ever had that experience where you hear a song, and almost immediately, you’re thrust back into an earlier time in your life? Music has a way of latching permanently onto moments of time, and even a faint trace of a certain melody can stir up the essence of a period of life once you hear it.
Music has the power to bring back memories, slow age-related cognitive decline, and improve cognitive processing speed for seniors with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Music’s power to boost memory is very much related to its ability to improve cognitive abilities overall.
New Neural Pathways
What kind of music you listen to impacts your brain’s processes and responses. It’s not just about the genre or style of music, but whether you’ve heard it before, that’s important. Listening to familiar songs can result in a dopamine hit, but new, unfamiliar melodies and rhythms challenge the brain.
As the brain processes these sounds, it makes a network of new neural pathways, which get strengthened over time with repetition. The music we hear in youth has special power over us because it’s associated with crucial times in our personal lives, and the sounds themselves are fused with these key periods.
However, don’t dismiss the latest music or make it a point to dig up old music you’ve never heard before. Such sounds keep the brain stimulated in important ways.
Bond with Friends and Family
Music can be the perfect way to bond with friends and family, as people have a very strong attachment to the sounds they like, and it feels good when you can enjoy them with somebody else.
Your favourite music is almost like a personality badge you can wear on your sleeve to demonstrate who you are and what you love.
Music can be appreciated on different levels. Sometimes, it makes people dance and smile, or it can be heart-wrenching and melancholy. Music also holds important cognitive and mental health powers for seniors that they’d be wise to tap into.
