Music And Memory

 Today I attended a lecture on Music and Memory. The lecture was given by two volunteers of the Victory Chorus. This choral group goes to adult day programs, memory care units and other long term health facilities to sing songs. The group started in 2019 and was set back by the pandemic. They did some concerts outside some facilities when the weather was nice and are just now getting back to doing concerts in person. The goal is to give people with cognitive dysfunction some musical stimulation while also giving their caregivers a break. The results are remarkable. One fellow, a former military leader, is gregarious at the concerts. He sings along and talks to everybody. At the end of the hour he flirts with his wife. His wife reports that all of the other hours of the week he is basically silent and coloring in adult coloring books. Originally the Victory Chorus started singing songs from the 1940's and 50's. Now they have found that most of the people with memory issues prefer music from the 1960's and 1970's. I think it's crazy interesting how music affects our brains. I worked with one woman with severe cognitive issues. She would have spells of mania where she could not sit down or could not stop screaming. The only way to calm her down was to take her outside for a walk and to sing songs like take me out to the ball game or how much is that doggie in the window or kumbaya or any patriotic song or any song by John Denver. I got pretty tired of John Denver but I did appreciate his ability to calm this woman from screaming into singing. Unlike me, she had perfect pitch. And she had a compulsion to finish a line. So if I sang, "How much is that doggie?" She would have to finish, "In the window?" One fellow attending the lecture said he liked to sing but no one liked to hear him sing. He was told that if he was in a group of 7 performers, that would be an issue. If he was in a group of 70 performers, his singing would be fine.