An audience of patients with Alzheimer’s(老年痴呆症) disease listens with concentrated attention as a young woman sings the French song “Beau Soir”. Despite his failing mind, one of the men in the crowd, Les Dean, translates the words into English for a friend.
Dean, 76, once taught music at Chicago’s Senn High School, invented and sold his own music education system and sang with the Chicago Symphony Chorus. Now, like many patients with Alzheimer’s, he is, to some extent, lost in the past, a stranger to the present. But when the music plays, he smiles and is transported to a place of beauty, where everything still makes sense.
In recent years, music therapy(疗法) has grown in popularity for its seeming ability to help calm people with dementia(痴呆) and reconnect them with their memories. Now a Northwestern University researcher is testing whether music played for residents of a suburban nursing home can be therapeutic, whether it can improve cognition(认知), conversation and relationships.
A person with dementia can recede(倒退) so far that he or she is no longer responsive, suggesting personality and consciousness(意识)have been lost. But in his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the well-known neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote that he’d seen such patients shake or weep while listening to music. “Once one has seen such responses,” he wrote, “one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling.”
For some people with dementia, music therapy has been shown to enhance attention and cognition to improve behavior while reducing the use of drugs and to reduce anxiety and depression. Singing songs can help refresh specific memories that otherwise might have been forgotten completely, experts say. Also, some patients are so nonresponsive, they may need music wake them up and get them moving.
Attracted by the potential benefits, Dr. Borna Bonakdarpour, a neurologist with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, put together a music therapy study at Silverado Orchard Park Memory Care Community.
Each week for 12 weeks, the nonprofit Institute for Therapy Through the Arts held concerts for 10 Silverado residents. The musicians are specially trained to apply their skills to therapy, often by interacting with patients during performances and getting them to beat on drums, sing and dance.
A similar group of residents in another nursing home went without the therapy to compare results. Since finishing the initial study period, researchers are analyzing the results and hope to try the same treatment for the opposite group in the future.
“Music therapy is gaining more confidence now as an intervention(介入), so this is a very exciting time,” Bonakdarpour said. “We thought when people get Alzheimer’s, they’re done because there’s no medicine to cure it. But there's so much we can do to have an impact and improve their quality of life.”
1. Why is Les Dean mentioned at the beginning?
A.To present his amazing life before he got the Alzheimer’s disease. |
B.To inspire the people who also suffered from the disease. |
C.To tell the readers that he was a music lover. |
D.To show the surprising function of music. |
2. Which of the following statement is true according to the passage?
A.Dr. Oliver Sacks believed music could call upon a self in Alzheimer’s patients. |
B.When patients are nonresponsive, music could hardly have any effect on them. |
C.Northwestern University has tested music can improve the patients’ conversation. |
D.It is obvious that singing can make the patients’ memories back to normal. |
3. From Bonakdarpour’s research, we can learn that __________.
A.the music therapy study has been successfully completed. |
B.the patients show no interest in music therapy. |
C.music therapy can help to improve the patients’ life quality. |
D.music therapy have a negative effect on the patients as an intervention. |
4. What does the author mainly want to tell us in the passage?
A.The terrible disease can be cured by music therapy. |
B.Music is beneficial to the people lost in Alzheimer’s darkness. |
C.People gradually realize the benefits of music. |
D.Everyone should fall in love with music. |