Amsterdam — Megan Worthy still remembers singing in choirs in Australia’s capital, Canberra, when she was growing up.
Now, with a rare form of early-onset dementia taking away her vision and other brain functions, the 58-year-old is transported back to her musical youth as she and her daughter Bronte sing together with other people with neurological conditions at the Amsterdam concert hall, the Concertgebouw.
“It’s pretty brutal,” Worthy said of his rare neurological condition. “I’m starting to miss it all, you know, and it’s been really rewarding and seeing all these people, yeah, it’s made me a lot of memories.”
She was participating in a so-called “singing circle” run by opera singer Martje de Lint in a landmark concert for the elderly with what she calls “weak brains,” many of whom have dementia or a form of Parkinson’s disease.
Millions of people have some form of dementia, the progressive loss of memory, reasoning, language skills and other cognitive functions. People may experience changes in personality, emotional control, visual perception. Alzheimer’s is the most widely recognized type, but there are many others with their own symptoms and underlying biology. Small strokes, for example, can impair blood flow to the brain and trigger what is known as vascular dementia.
The singers in Amsterdam, who each pay 20 euros ($23.50) to attend, line up with their carers in a circle of chairs under a ceiling hung with 14 crystal chandeliers in the venue’s ornate Hall of Mirrors.
“We always say, music is like vitamins,” said Selien Neppers, 78, who once managed a Dutch boogie woogie and blues band and now regularly attends the singing circle.
Hovering in the middle, often dropping to one knee and reaching her hands to connect with the singer, de Lint. He and other singers from his organization criss-cross the Netherlands and Europe, leading vocal workshops.
Singing, De Lint says, is a way to keep the brain active and bring family members and their loved ones closer.
“So we give people perspective,” he says before his singing session in Amsterdam. “It’s really like training the brain, the body, to be more resilient and to understand the perspective you still have.”
The hour-long session clearly had an emotional impact on the singers and their carers. Assistants regularly hand out paper tissues for people to shed tears. A man gently reaches out to touch the face of a woman next to him as he sings songs from Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender” to Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” and “Amazing Grace.”
Brankel Frank, a neurobiologist not connected to de Lint’s project, agrees that singing can be beneficial for people with dementia or Alzheimer’s or other types of neurodegenerative diseases.
Music “really speaks to areas of the brain that haven’t atrophied yet,” he told The Associated Press. “So, for example, their verbal skills are often compromised, but music speaks to parts of the brain that don’t need verbal skills. So it touches their emotion, their sense of self, their identity.”
Scientists are studying the potential benefits of music for people with dementia, traumatic brain injuries, Parkinson’s disease and stroke. Music lights up many areas of the brain, strengthening neural connections between areas that control language, memories, emotions and movement.
Megan’s daughter, Bronte Henfling, said it was also good to get her mother into a new environment that wasn’t a medical appointment to discuss her mother’s posterior cortical atrophy.
“Hearing everyone come together and sing … reminds us that we’re all human and there’s a humanity there that’s really gratifying and nice to be a part of,” she said.
(tags to translate)entertainment
