Music key to understanding ageing mind
Health professionals and family carers will discover how music can be used to gauge a person’s brain function as they grow older, at a University of Western Sydney’s MARCS Institute public lecture next week.
Professor Andrea Halpern, from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, a cognitive psychologist who has extensively researched how normal ageing and Alzheimer's disease affect the way musicians and non-musicians interpret music, will present at the lecture.
“What we have found is for some musical tasks, like recognising and naming familiar tunes, older adults are just as adept as younger adults, and being a musician doesn’t make much difference,” she says.
“Musicians at any age are better than non-musicians at tasks like comparing two tunes and noticing small differences between them, but even they show some declines with age.
“What this means is that ageing and experience are both important influences on our skills over the lifespan but in different ways.”
In her research, Professor Halpern has used functional magnetic brain imaging to examine which areas of the brain are responsible for processing music.
“Many of the brain areas that are active when we perceive music are also active when we imagine music.
“So the idea that we can ‘hear’ a song in our heads does indeed have some physiological legitimacy.”
Professor Kate Stevens, leader of the Music Cognition and Action (MCA) research program at the MARCS Institute, claims there’s “enormous” potential for science to investigate connections between music, memory, thinking and health.
Professor Halpern is the keynote speaker at the MCA Symposium, held at the MARCS Institute at the UWS Bankstown Campus on Monday, 10 March 2014. She will present in Building 23, Lecture Theatre 4 at 4pm.
