June 3, 2025 – Jacksonville, FL
June is Aphasia Awareness Month and Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month, offering the perfect moment to explore something timeless yet transformative: music.
Across cultures and centuries, music has brought comfort, sparked joy, and stirred memory. But in healthcare – particularly among aging adults and those living with cognitive disorders – music is proving to be much more than emotional resonance. It’s medicine.
Listening to music isn’t just a passive experience. It lights up a network of brain regions across both hemispheres:
As neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin writes in This Is Your Brain on Music, music doesn’t live in just one place in the brain – it’s “a distributed system, involving perception, action, cognition, emotion, memory, and even language.”
That’s why music can reach people even when words no longer can.
For patients with aphasia, especially those with damage to the left hemisphere (language center), singing can unlock speech when spoken words fail. This phenomenon has been the foundation of Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) – a technique that uses melody and rhythm to engage the right hemisphere to support verbal expression.
In Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks shared remarkable cases of stroke survivors regaining the ability to speak through singing. One man, unable to utter full sentences, could sing entire lyrics to his favorite Beatles songs – eventually using those melodies as scaffolding for spoken language.
For individuals with dementia or Alzheimer’s, music may be one of the last threads connecting them to who they are.
Even when verbal memory fades, musical memory often persists – likely because it draws on multiple brain regions. A well-known example is Henry, a nursing home resident captured in the documentary Alive Inside, who appeared unresponsive – until headphones played a song from his youth. He began to move, sing, and speak vividly, awakened by the music he loved.
Studies confirm this is no anomaly. Music can:
Music doesn’t need to be formal “therapy” to be therapeutic. Here are simple, powerful ways to integrate music into care for aging adults:
Music’s ability to touch multiple facets of the human experience makes it a valuable tool in caring for individuals with cognitive impairments. By integrating music into care strategies, we can enhance the quality of life for patients and provide meaningful support for their cognitive and emotional needs.
The bottom line? Music isn’t just a comfort – it’s a cognitive tool, an emotional bridge, and in many cases, a clinical intervention.
At Wellbox, we know that whole-person care means going beyond checkboxes. Whether it’s helping a patient manage their chronic conditions or offering tools that reconnect them with themselves, we believe in approaches that honor the human side of healthcare.
This month, and every month, let’s not underestimate the power of a song.
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