Music is the universal language of mankind, allowing communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries. It is expressed and shared by all ages from an unborn child to an elderly person. Every culture around the world has some form of music and song, each with their purpose, some might be to accompany a dance, soothe an infant, express love or express grief or many other purposes. Whilst it has these enormous numbers of benefits, what specifically caught my interest was the link between music and its ability to enhance cognitive functions to help promote healthy aging for older people. It was during a conversation with a close friend of mine, who happens to be a leisure and lifestyle worker at an aged care that, that I truly understood how research from articles such as ‘Lifespan Memory for Popular Songs’ (Bartlett & Snelus, 1980) and others truly impact the leisure activity planning process of these workers. James C Bartlett is a key theorist, whose work has influenced many the researchers in this field to examine and explore the link between music and elderly people with cognitive impairments such as memory loss. Bartlett is known as a pioneer in researching how people perceive and recall non-verbal information, and avantgarde researcher in a large number of fields regarding memory. Additionally to being a researcher who publications has been cited over three-thousands times, his bachelor’s and doctoral psychology degree allowed him to become the head of the doctoral program for cognition and neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain
Science at The University of Texas. Bartletts’ article Lifespan Memory for Popular Songs, examined how middle-aged and elderly subjects long term memory performed. His findings implied that certainly popular songs during one’s life were held in long term memory as people aged and that the temporal judgments were based on episodic memory for information at least partially independent of lyric representation. This article although it was one of Bartlett’s earlier works, certainly was one of the findings that initiated the idea of MEAMs, Music Evoked Autobiographical Memory (Janata, Tomic, & Rakowski, 2007). MEAMs’ played a key role in helping those with memory loss impairments, music allowed them to access memories and connect with their young self as well as with their loved ones. This was one of the key ideas that took my attention, as our autobiographical memories are our life stories, this helps us, specifically patients with neurological disorders to gasps a sense of self that they might be lost due to their illness. Another significant research of Bartlett was his work regarding the comparison of recognition of melodies with young, elderly, and elderly Alzheimer patients(Barlett, Halpern, & Dowling, 1995). This opened up doors to other research with Alzheimer patients, as it indicated how these patients were more liberal in recognizing traditional tunes than modern tunes. Similarly, another work of his found that early-stage Alzheimer adults were able to near perfectly discriminate familiar tunes, like holiday tunes(Halpern & Bartlett, 2010).