The part of your
brain responsible for ASMR catalogs music, and appears to be a stronghold
against Alzheimer's and dementia.
29
April, 2018
Some music inspires you to move your feet, some inspires you to
get out there and change the world. In any case, and to move hurriedly on to
the point of this article, it's fair to say that music moves people in special
ways.
If you're especially into a piece of music, your brain does
something called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR),
which feels to you like a tingling in your brain or scalp. It's
nature's own little "buzz", a natural reward, that is described by
some as a "head orgasm". Some even think that it explains why people
go to church, for example, "feeling the Lord move through you", but
that's another article for another time.
Turns out that ASMR is pretty special. According to a recently
published study in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease (catchy
name!), the part of your brain responsible for ASMR doesn't get lost to
Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's tends to put people into layers of confusion, and the
study confirms that music can sometimes actually lift people out of the Alzheimer's haze and bring them back to
(at least a semblance of) normality... if only for a short while. ASMR is
powerful stuff!
This phenomenon has been observed several times but rarely
studied properly. One of the most famous examples of this is the story of
Henry, who comes out of dementia while listening to songs from his youth:
Jeff Anderson, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor in
Radiology at the University of Utah Health and contributing author on the
study, says "In our society, the diagnoses of dementia are snowballing and
are taxing resources to the max. No one says playing music will be a cure for
Alzheimer's disease, but it might make the symptoms more manageable, decrease
the cost of care and improve a patient's quality of life."
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