Throughout this semester, I’ve indulged myself in researching more about the topics surrounding multisensory rooms. After a few months, the specific tools and techniques that require music really piqued my interest. Therefore, I spent the last few weeks researching music theory, how it works, its effects, down to its very origin. 

Learning that music theory began from the research on songbirds and how they use music and a specific part of their brains to re-remember the songs they sing every season, I plan to read a lot more sources involving research on songbirds and how they related to the part of our brain affected by Alzheimer’s. 

https://www.karger.com/Article/Fulltext/447048

https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-happens-brain-alzheimers-disease#:~:text=In%20Alzheimer’s%20disease%2C%20as%20neurons,significant%20loss%20of%20brain%20volume.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2650497/

Through the next few months of summer break, to understand how we could potentially use music to “heal” a human brain, I plan to read more of these papers that talk about how different brain diseases affect the brain. 

This week I worked on researching the specifics of how music affects our brain, in terms of psychologically and emotionally. Several blogs and papers piqued my interest.

https://www.aimm.edu/blog/how-does-music-affect-your-mood

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3741536/

https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/your-brain-on-music/

https://www.sclhealth.org/blog/2019/04/how-listening-to-certain-songs-can-impact-our-brain-and-affect-our-mood/

It’s common knowledge that music has a possibility of increasing dopamine levels in the brain which is the cause of one feeling happy/good when listening to the music that they love. From one of the sources, it is stated that the type of music that you like is the type of music that your gray matter likes as well, so music therapy is more of a person-by-person therapy.

However, from my research, I believe the best way to simplify how music therapy works on the brain is that music allows for the increase of neurogenesis within the hippocampus, which is the center of production and retrieval of memories, while also regulating our emotional responses. When a patient is affected by Alzheimer’s disease, this is the first section of the brain affected. 

One of the interesting side research topics that seemed interesting was the research about seasonal songbirds and how they sing different songs according to the different seasons, while their neurons regenerate and they learn the songs all over again over the months.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC44498/