The science behind music and memory just got a lot more personal — and a lot more promising.
A study by Psyche Loui and colleagues at Northeastern University's MIND Lab, published in Scientific Reports, shows that listening to your own favorite music for just one hour a day over eight weeks can measurably strengthen brain connectivity in older adults.
The research involved adults aged 54–89 who listened to personalized playlists daily for eight weeks. Brain imaging revealed increased connectivity between the auditory system and the medial prefrontal cortex — the brain's reward processing hub. Crucially, the effect was significantly stronger for self-selected music than for preselected songs.
As Dr. Loui explained: "There's something about music that is this functional connectivity between the auditory and reward system, and that's why music is so special."
This finding matters deeply for Oscillo Biosciences. Our co-founders Dr. Edward Large and Dr. Ji Chul Kim have long collaborated with Dr. Loui, and Oscillo's SynchronyGamma intervention builds on this same principle — that music activates a uniquely powerful combination of auditory, motor, and reward networks in the brain. By precisely engineering the rhythmic and frequency properties of the music in our intervention, we can target these same circuits with therapeutic precision.
The study was published as: Loui P et al. "Longitudinal Changes in Auditory and Reward Systems Following Receptive Music-Based Intervention in Older Adults." Scientific Reports, 2022. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-15687-5
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Source: MedicalXpress / Northeastern University — https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-07-beatles-memory-music-brain.html