Memory Loss: Elderly Man In Nursing Home Music

Memory loss is a very stressful thing to face. While the brain in struggling to remember lost memories of family and friends, a person with dementia can become angry, sad, or even depressed. This is why music therapy is so helpful to them. Music is known to calm the brain from stresses. According to the Alzheimer's Foundation of America, the best music to play for a person with dementia is music from they listened to from the ages eighteen to twenty-five. In-addition to familiar music, music from movie’s like The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz are also helpful. There is a video on YouTube that showcases the effects that music from the time a person was a young adult has on the brain. The video is called “Elderly Man In Nursing Home …show more content…
Dementia is very stressful for people to go through. Trying to remember certain people or things can cause a lot of strain on the brain. These strains can cause stress, depression, and anxiety for certain people. According to the Daily Mail article “Why thinking too hard can put a strain on your brain,” over straining the brain can actually drain glucose from a key part of the brain. “Older people, in particular, are likely to notice the impact of straining the grey matter, the experts say” (Chapman). This is why music that holds no memories is helpful. New music holds nothing for a person to remember, nothing for a person to worry about, and nothing for a person to strain their mind about. Playing certain types of music can be very helpful to promote movement or rest. There are two types of music, they are called stimulative and sedative. Stimulative music is music with that helps promote movement. Sedative music is music that helps promote sleep and rest, or even get rid of stress. Stimulative music has percussive sounds with quick tempos, and sedative music have slow melodies that are more like lullabies. There are many types of stimulative and sedative songs that can be played, it all depends on the person (Alzheimer's Foundation of …show more content…
There is a video on Youtube called “Another Miracle - Music Therapy & End Stage Alzheimer's”. In this video a woman named Melissa Hirokawa, who is the owner of Living Spirit Therapy and a board-certified music therapist, sings to a woman who is in end stage Alzheimer’s. The woman with Alzheimer’s, named Dorothy, starts to react to the music almost immediately. Dorothy starts to smile, and even sing and dance with the music being sung to her. This is an example of stimulative music, because the upbeat tempo of the song encouraged Dorothy to dance and move