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Thaut had always been fascinated by the power of music. Prior to becoming a neuroscientist, he had been a professional violinist in Europe. In the early 2000s, while working as a

neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, he did groundbreaking research involving people with Parkinson’s disease and those recovering from stroke, showing that when rhythmically strong

music was played to such patients, they synchronized their walking gait with the music and moved more quickly and with better joint control. The therapy is called rhythmic auditory

stimulation. “Stroke patients walk much more symmetrically and faster,” Thaut told me recently over Zoom. “Parkinson’s patients don’t have that shuffle and tendency to fall over.” For years,

Thaut had been hearing anecdotal reports of music’s power to help dementia patients, and he had been eager to study the phenomenon. He got the chance in 2016 when he accepted a

professorship at the University of Toronto and helped create a partnership with the Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science and geriatric psychiatry at St. Michael’s, one of the city’s

largest hospitals. His first experiments in music and memory using fMRI, in 2018, compared the effects of “autobiographically salient” music that Alzheimer’s patients had loved and listened

to for 25 years or more with brand-new music created by Thaut and his team.  Patients first heard the new music an hour before they entered the scanner. When they heard it again during

their scans, it had no deep encoding in the brain — it activated the auditory area only. “Basically, a sensory memory,” Thaut calls it. The beloved, familiar music, however, when played to

patients in the scanner, lit up a larger network of the brain — including in the frontal lobes, where higher-order reasoning and memory are processed, a clear and objective sign of a

musical “memory trigger” for people with dementia. “They recognized it in terms of ‘that is music I know,’ ” Thaut says. “ ‘I know what that is! That is the music I danced to when I met my

wife.’ This activation spreads throughout the entire cortex — and the whole network comes alive.”  He stresses that hearing autobiographically salient music does not regress patients to

an earlier time of life. Quite the reverse. “It actually triggers a cognitive boost to orient them in the immediate reality. One could say, ‘Oh, they remember music from when they were 15

years old, and they feel like a 15-year-old again.’ No. They’re not suddenly acting like a 15-year-old. The music gives them a sense of orientation in the here and now—and an identity: ‘That

is part of my life. I know who I am.’ ” In a different experiment, Thaut also reported a boost in cognitive functioning — a finding similar to what Tomaino had seen in the 1990s.

Alzheimer’s patients who listened to personal playlists of favorite music daily and talked about what they could remember with their spouse or caregiver for one hour a day for four weeks

showed significant improvement on memory tests, Thaut says.  “That is extremely unusual. Ordinarily, these patients don’t improve in anything; if you’re lucky, you can slow down the decline

ramp.” He hastens to add that he and his colleagues have not found a “cure” for Alzheimer’s or dementia. “We cannot say that we are reversing the disease, because it has a certain

biological process. We are not, for instance, destroying, with music, the amyloid plaques or the tau tangles that are believed to be the cause of the memory loss. But in areas of the brain,

activating preserved networks gives people at least a cognitive boost that allows them to operate in a more functional way.” The most eye-popping of Thaut’s findings is that after four weeks

of listening to their favorite music daily, patients’ brains had a greater density of white matter. “If you have an increase in white matter density or volume in a certain area of the

brain,” Thaut says, “that means there are more highways active between the neurons. There’s more traffic.” A dead neuron cannot be brought back to life, but music appears to bolster

connections between preserved neurons. “So we are building as much as we can around destroyed stuff,” Thaut says.  “It’s a bit like a city that gets bombed. Many houses are gone, but we can

emphasize what is still standing. We can figure out how to get a street from here to there. We can rebuild to make that city support as much life as possible.” All of this raises the

question, for those of us not afflicted by dementia, of whether we should be loading up our Spotify Rocking ’70s playlists with the songs we first fell in love with in our teens and early

20s — that period of life when, according to Daniel Levitin, a musician, neuroscientist and author of _This Is Your Brain on Music_ (2006), most people form their musical tastes.  Says

Thaut, “We can assume that active and positive stimulation is good for brain health. Engaging in music you like and enjoy is definitely a great part of it. Can it reduce risk for dementia in

the medical sense, like aspirin against stroke? No. There are many factors—genetics, injuries, etc.—that contribute to disease. But it may provide boosts to keep the brain healthy longer.”

And don’t worry about friends or spouses who deride you for engaging in empty nostalgia when you fire up Elton John’s 1972 banger “Rocket Man” for the 20th time that month. It is precisely

the familiarity of such music, the memories around it, the goose-bump-inducing pleasure of its soaring chorus and the surge of dopamine that can be released by your brain’s pleasure and

reward centers as that crescendo arrives— “I’m a rocket MANNNNN … And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time!” — that can make such beloved songs so therapeutic, according to Thaut.

“This is your daily brain exercise,” he says. “As a general principle: If there’s something that’s good for you, do it as much as you can.” Listening to new music has its own rewards, of

course — what better way to bond with a tween than over Taylor Swift? But for revving up the memory centers embedded throughout your brain, science seems to suggest that familiar tunes

work best. PART V “SHE LOVES YOU” I learned firsthand about the miraculous power of music for dementia patients in November 2020, when, for this magazine, I was researching a story about

Tony Bennett’s previously undisclosed Alzheimer’s disease.  Visiting him in his apartment on Manhattan’s Central Park South, I saw a man unable to converse, who barely registered my

presence and who, I was told by his wife, Susan, had forgotten the use for common objects like a fork or keys. Yet when his longtime piano accompanist began to play, Bennett, at the sound of

the first notes, came alive, walked to the piano and proceeded to perform, impeccably, an hour of music from his set, recalling every lyric, crescendo, melody, physical gesture. It was

impossible to believe he was in the late stages of a devastating illness that two years later would end his life. Now, once again writing about music and memory for _AARP The Magazine,_ I am

delighted to discover that, like Bennett’s, my own memory is unlocked by musical triggers. I have, for the last couple of years, been writing a memoir and, at age 65, I find that I am

getting to it just in time — before certain salient aspects of my past have faded from my synapses forever. The author with mom Carol, circa 1963. Courtesy John Colapinto Recently, I was

revising a chapter concerning my earliest memory of my late mother — a memory from when I was 4 years old, in my native Toronto, and we were drawing on sheets of brown packing paper while

the radio played a song that had just burst onto the Canadian airwaves and caused a sensation. It was called “She Loves You,” and it was by a new group named the Beatles.  The date was

September 1963, which I can state with accuracy because that is when the song debuted across North America. Though a massive hit in Canada, the song flopped in the United States — the

Beatles would have to wait more than four months for a U.S. hit with the release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and their epochal appearance on _The Ed Sullivan Show_. In any case, in my

original draft of this scene, the details were annoyingly hazy. I knew my mom was encouraging my nascent skills as a cartoonist, but all was dim and undefined, lacking the specific detail

that makes writing come alive. But thanks to my experience with Tony Bennett, and my more recent encounters with Connie Tomaino, Xiyu Zhang and Michael Thaut, I decided to listen to “She

Loves You” as a memory prod. Reader, I might as well have discovered that someone had secretly filmed and recorded my mother and me that distant afternoon. Now, with the music as spur and

prod to my memory, I could “see” that, on that day six decades ago, I was drawing the Beatles’ faces on that packing paper — and that my mother, to aid me, had laid out, open on the floor,

a sheet of newspaper that featured photos of the Fab Four. Pointing to each face in turn and saying their names (“Paul … John … George … Ringo”), my mother was brought back to life, de-aged

to a youthful 31, and I could see her nimbus of soft brown curls, her large green eyes, her huge smile — _That’s my mom! _— as she exclaimed over my attempt (failed, as my revived

memory assures me) to capture the Beatles’ individual looks. It was a heart-stopping journey back in time, a resurrection that, frankly, moved me to both smiles and tears. At least for as

long as the music played.