When the music is good … for memory
For several years, music has been invited into therapies to stimulate the memory of patients with Alzheimer’s. But a question remained unanswered: do all the songs have the same effect? Do sad, joyful or energetic songs trigger identical answers in the brain?
A study published in August 2025 in The Journal of Neuroscience provides new answers. Researchers from Rice University and the University of California, Davis, wanted to understand how music changes memory according to the emotional excitement it generates. Contrary to what one might think, music was not played before or during memorization, but only after the participants had watched a series of objects. This clarification made it possible to isolate the effect of music on the consolidation of already encoded memories.
As Kayla Clark explains in media NeuroscienceNews, first author of the study: “We found that music does not always improve memory, but rather that it changes memory as a function of the way it changes the excitation“.
Why some music improves your memories and others blur them
In their tests, the researchers found that music did not overall improve the memory of objects. However, some participants showed a clear improvement, especially when it came to recognizing that an object was slightly different from that initially presented. All had completed a psychological questionnaire to measure their emotional response.
The analysis revealed a crucial point: the benefits appeared especially in individuals who felt a Moderate emotional excitation levelwhether it is classical music perceived as joyful, sad, familiar or not. Conversely, those who had felt too strong – positive or negative emotion – remembered the essentials but lost in precision, their memory becoming more vague.
This distinction is essential: memory is based on a balance between the general’s memory and the memory of details. The first makes it possible to retain the main idea of an experience, without taking care of each superfluous detail. The second is essential to remember specific elements, such as a color, form or exact word.
Stephanie Leal, co -author of the study, underlines: “We used a task designed to capture the difference between memory based on the essentials and memory -based memory. Music helped the memory of details but only when the level of emotional excitement was optimal for the person“.
She adds: “Music has the ability to influence part of your brain called hippocampus, essential to transform experiences into memories. We believe that it is possible to exploit this selectively to strengthen or on the contrary weaken memory according to the therapeutic objectives“.
Can music become a key treatment against Alzheimer’s?
If these results open up exciting perspectives, the authors insist on the limits of the study. The experiences were only carried out with extracts from classical music, and sensitivity to music varies considerably from one individual to another. This arouses a strong emotion in a person can remain neutral for another, making the effects very variable.
Despite these reservations, the team hopes that these discoveries will one day allow music to specific therapeutic needs. The idea is to be able to develop personalized musical interventions tomorrow for disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease or post-traumatic stress syndrome.
According to the researchers, using music to strengthen the memory of details could help preserve cognitive capacities as they age or support people at the start of Alzheimer’s. Conversely, betting on a more general memory could reduce the impact of invasive memories in disorders such as anxiety or post-traumatic stress.