Friday, October 19, 2012

Music and Human Memory

Hello.. This period's extra busy for me, with the peak weeks for this month being the next week and the week after, so I won't really be blogging autobiographical/episodic posts properly with pictures about my life. Must be mindful that my life as a student is limited though, and always be grateful for what I have so far.
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I'm supposed to do a literature review for one of my modules, so I'm just typing some thoughts now. I can't type too much cos' some of my sentences will be used in my paper, and I don't want my plagiarism % to be too high for my paper because I've plagiarised myself in my own blog -__- that'll be really lame. Another alternative would be to publish this post only after submission of the paper.

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Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) suffer from dementia, which causes deficits in certain types of memory. This is the reason why researchers conduct research on dementia patients, though usually narrowed down to AD patients since it's the most common form of dementia, because we can better understand the underlying mechanisms of memory, and what can help to improve memory by working on these mechanisms. It is unethical to induce this on human subjects with normal memory, so certain types of memory cannot be directly manipulated, and in such circumstances, quasi-experimental research will have to be done, which limits the control of researchers, which may affect the accuracy of results.

(I feel like such a noob because I don't know how exactly to phrase and explain why we use patients with memory deficits)

Researchers Simmons-Stern, Budson, and Ally in their paper Music as a memory enhancer in patients with Alzheimer's disease propose that "brain areas subserving music processing may be preferentially spared by AD, allowing a more holistic encoding that facilitates recognition," and that music causes AD patients to be more aroused, which allows better attention and improved memory. This is based on their study to investigate the effect of music on encoding, on the subsequent recognition of associated verbal information.

TO be continued. Time for me to go for class.

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