We don’t forget music as we get older

English and Canadian researchers have just discovered that aging does not affect our musical memory.

We remember music, even when we get older. This is what Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the magazine, explains to us Epsiloonechoing a study by Canadian researchers.

franceinfo: Doesn’t age limit our memory of the music we like?

Mathilde Fontez : No, and it’s an exception to the cognitive decline that strikes us as we age. This decline particularly affects memory, as we know. When we get older, we have more difficulty encoding new information, retrieving memories buried in our neurons, or even isolating information from ambient noise. Except music! This is what Canadian researchers show in a study that has the merit of having been carried out in real conditions: a real concert by the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, in St John’s, Canada. The musicians played a piece that everyone knows, the Little night music by Mozart and pieces composed for the occasion, unknown to the audience. The spectators then had to identify them later in the concert.

Did the researchers expect older people to perform less well?

Indeed, and they also expected that those who had received musical education would do better. But they were wrong. The study shows that learning music has only a very small effect. And above all, that age has no impact at all. Older people do just as well as young people in this “blind test“. This means that the elders were able to extract the melody from the ambient noise, that they encoded it efficiently in their memory, that they were able to retrieve it – even for the most difficult pieces – composed especially to be difficult to memorize. Music allowed them to recover all these cognitive skills that are usually blunted by aging.

Does this reinforce the idea that music is good therapy?

Yes, of course: it puts music on a pedestal, it is an incredibly effective tool for maintaining memory. It can be used as a neural stimulant, to prevent the brain from aging. It is like a support, researchers speak of a “cognitive scaffold”. Music anchors our memories, even if we do not really know why – perhaps because of the emotions it provokes in us. Besides, humans have been using it instinctively for a long time: throughout history, songs have been used to transmit information. Good news for our old age, when Blur, Oasis and the Red Hot will seem as ancient as Maurice Chevalier…