News I thought this might be of interest to some. Cindy Donnell ________________________________________ Dementia may change musical tastes
January 04, 2001
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Dementia--an illness that causes the loss of memory and reasoning--may in some cases bring with it gains, such as a new appreciation of pop music, Italian researchers suggest.
In the journal Neurology, investigators report two cases where patients with frontotemporal dementia suddenly began to enjoy pop music.
In the first case, a 68-year-old lawyer developed frontotemporal dementia--losing abstract thinking, judgment and language skills--but 2 years after his diagnosis, he also developed an obsession for Italian pop music, although he had previously called it "mere noise" and preferred classical music.
Once he developed the new liking, he listened to the pop songs at full volume and hunted for pop tapes until he died 4 years later, according to the researchers at the National Center for Research and Care of Alzheimer's Disease in Brescia, Italy.
Likewise, a 73-year-old homemaker with dementia lost interest in her children and household chores; she developed impaired abstract thinking, judgment and reasoning, but also developed a new love for pop music--despite never having enjoyed music before.
Suddenly, she shared her 11-year-old granddaughter's musical interests, saying pop artists had "beautiful voices and played good music with nice rhythms."
The research suggests that changes in the brain can alter preferences and that dementia may bring certain artistic gains, although the neural basis for musical taste remains largely unexplored.
"I believe that a strong clinical message lies behind these apparently quirky observations," lead author Dr. Giovanni B. Frisoni told Reuters Health. "That dementia is characterized not only by loss of functions--as often lay people as well as physicians believe--but also by functional gains. Under this perspective, the demented person is in a more complex--rather than a progressively simpler--emotional and cognitive world."
He added, "It is possible that functional gains are more frequent than believed, but physicians fail to detect them simply because they do not look for them."
Frisoni noted that the researchers have not found this behavior change in any of the 1,500 patients seen in the Italian Alzheimer center in the last 5 years, but have detected it in 2 of the 46 frontotemporal dementia patients during that same time.
"The frontal and temporal lobes (of the brain) seem variously involved in the perception of pitch, timbre, rhythm, and familiarity," Frisoni suggested. "In our patients, the lesions...may have damaged some specific circuit relevant for the integration and appreciation of musical material."
It may be that pop music, written to appeal to the widest possible audience, may simply find new appeal when some circuits become damaged, the study authors propose, although they emphasize that liking pop music does not mean someone has brain dysfunction.
"However, there is no accounting for musical taste in normal persons, and our study obviously does not imply that pop music listeners have frontal dysfunction," Frisoni told Reuters Health. "Musical taste (ultimately) relies on extremely complex individual, social, and cultural factors."
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