Why old songs still reach them

Songs are stored differently from words

A conversation asks her to find a specific word right now and put it in the right place. A song does not ask. It arrives already assembled, with the melody carrying the words along, and she joins something that is already moving rather than building it herself.

Music from roughly fifteen to twenty five years old is the strongest. Those years lay down deeper than any others, which is why the songs that come back are the ones from before she was your mother, and why they are frequently songs you have never heard her mention.

Find the right decade, not the right song

Work out roughly when she was twenty and start there. If she was twenty in 1972, that is where her music lives, whatever she says she likes now.

Ask the oldest person in the family rather than her. Siblings and cousins remember what she played, and she may not be able to tell you any more.

• Film songs from her decade, in the language she grew up speaking rather than the one she settled into.
• Bhajans, kirtan, qawwali or hymns if the household was religious. These are often the very last thing to go.
• Anything from a wedding. Wedding music is laid down hard and is almost always joyful, which matters.
• Watch her face for the first fifteen seconds and abandon anything that does not land. You are looking for recognition, not for taste.

Use it at the hours that are hard

Late afternoon and early evening are when most families report things getting difficult, and they are the best hours to have something ready rather than to go looking.

Put the music on before the difficult hour rather than in response to it. Once somebody is already agitated, a sudden change in the room is one more thing to cope with. Music that was already playing is part of the room.

Sing badly, out loud, with her

Playing a song to somebody is a small thing. Singing it with them is a completely different one. It makes her a participant instead of an audience, and it is one of the very few activities left where she can do the thing as well as you can, or better.

You will feel self conscious for about a week. Nobody in the room minds, and your voice is doing something a speaker cannot: it is yours, and she has known it for decades.

What it does and does not do

It does not improve her memory and anybody promising that is selling something. What it reliably does is change the next twenty minutes, which on a bad day is the only unit of time that matters.

It also gives you something to do together that is not care. Most of your contact with her has quietly turned into tasks. An hour of old songs is not a task, and you will notice the difference as much as she does.

Where else to look

These are other people’s pages, not ours. Our own published work and the neurologist who reviews it are on the research page.

• Cultural adaptation of Alzheimer’s disease assessment scale-cognitive subscale for use in India and validation of the Tamil version for South Indian population.
  The cultural adaptation of the same questionnaire for use in India.
• Hindi Version of Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination III: Distinguishing Cognitive Impairment Among Older Indians at the Lower Cut-Offs.
  A Hindi memory questionnaire validated for older adults in India.
• Alzheimer’s and Dementia Support, India
  The Alzheimer’s Association’s own pages for families in India.