Richard Morrison

Music's power to unlock memories in dementia patients is remarkable

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Despite living in Vienna, a city teeming with orchestras and composers, Sigmund Freud was intensely irritated by music. 'Some rational or perhaps analytic turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected,' he wrote. In other words, he resented music because he couldn't explain in analytical terms its effects on us – as he could explain (or thought he could) our sexual urges or dreams.

More than a century later, we still don't understand how certain combinations of soundwaves trigger feelings of melancholy, exhilaration, wistfulness, love or a thousand other emotions too tangled to put into words. On page 54, Rebecca Franks looks at the complex and mysterious way in which mental illness affects musical creativity. But what fascinates me as much is the reverse: the remarkable effect of music on people with dementia.

We can't completely explain it – this way that music unlocks, albeit temporarily, brains that in other respects have become permanently unhinged from rational thought, or indeed from their own sense of self. All we can say is that music is often 'the last thing to go', perhaps because our musical instincts are more deeply embedded in our brains (and in our 300,000-year development as a species) than, say, verbal language or conscious reasoning.