The Music That Keeps Dementia At Bay
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
We have previously addressed the question: Does Music Really Benefit The Brain?
The short answer is “yes”, the longer answer we covered in the above-linked article, and today we will explore another benefit:
Tuning in to lasting cognitive health
Researchers (Dr. Emma Jaffa et al.) investigated the effects of listening to music, playing to music, or both, on cognitive health in older age.
Specifically, the study looked at 10,893 people over the age of 70 with no diagnosis of dementia at the start of the study.
In a nutshell, they found:
- older adults who listened to music after age 70 enjoyed a 39% lower risk of dementia and a 17% lower risk of cognitive impairment.
- those who played a musical instrument had a 35% lower risk of dementia compared with those who rarely or never played, but no additional reduction in risk of cognitive impairment.
- people who both listened to and played music regularly showed a 33% reduction in dementia risk and a 22% reduction in cognitive impairment.
Furthermore, benefits were strongest in those with higher education (16+ years) but showed inconsistent results in the middle education group (12–15 years).
You can find the paper itself, here: What Is the Association Between Music-Related Leisure Activities and Dementia Risk? A Cohort Study
You might be wondering:
- why playing music yields a lower decrease in risk of dementia than listening to it
- why doing both yields an even smaller reduction in dementia risk than listening without playing or playing without listening
That’s very counterintuitive, isn’t it? We might hypothesize that the answer lies in how we go about the activities, and what that means for our brain.
It is quite likely that someone over the age of 70 who regularly plays a musical instrument is not new to doing so; in fact, chances are they learned as a child. This means that for them, playing music is in large part a matter of muscle memory. Which is great, but is very different from actively engaging conscious parts of the brain to do things.
In contrast, it’s quite likely someone over the age of 70 who regularly listens to music is having their brain constantly surprised by whatever the radio station (or streaming service playlist on shuffle) puts up next.
An additional hypothesis (that tags on to that last one) is that someone who regularly listens to music, but is not the one playing, is more likely to be dancing to that music, and we’ve written about that previously:
Dancing vs Parkinson’s Depression ← this article is about a rather fun study, and the results were very predictable (i.e: it helps), and/but the mechanism of action is not necessarily something that people might think of in advance!
Even without dancing, there are other benefits too, though, including engaging our parasympathetic nervous system, which is good for our heart, gut, brain, and general health—especially if we sing or hum along to the music:
The Science Of Sounds ← this also covers the science (yes, science) of mantra meditation vs music
And, for that matter: The Music That Has Painkilling Effects ← and no, it’s not about distraction! As it turns out, listening to pleasurable music activates the brain’s opioid receptors.
In other words, the response is neurologically similar to taking an opioid drug, except that it’s more moderate, so it’s not addictive (and even if it were, then well, it would be a much safer addiction than opioids!)
Want to learn more?
For a deeper dive into this topic, you might like this book that we reviewed a while back:
This Is Your Brain on Music – by Dr. Daniel Levitin
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Retirement Can Be A Time Of Great Health! If…
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Will Harlow, the over-50s specialist physio, observes and advises:
Move with care, but do move
Avoid these three common mistakes:
Mistake 1: Stopping strength-building movements. Many retirees become less active, losing daily movement that used to maintain strength without them thinking about it. This naturally leads to muscle loss (the body will generally not maintain what’s not being used), reduced mobility, increased fall risk, chronic pain (often with arthritis, which in turn came with the reduced mobility), and the like. So instead, do 2–3 short strength-training sessions each week.
Mistake 2: Ignoring small aches and pains. It’s common to dismiss pain as “just age,” but it’s better to take things seriously and deal with them as they arise, and/or best yet, proactively. Many aches can improve with targeted mobility exercises, done gently and consistently.
Mistake 3: Not pushing yourself enough. Being overly cautious, on the other hand, can lead to deterioration. Safe doesn’t necessarily mean easy—a little discomfort or fatigue during exercise is often necessary for results. A good way of pushing yourself without overexerting yourself is to use “reps in reserve” to gauge intensity: stop with 2–3 reps left “in the tank”. For cardio, aim to be slightly breathless but not overly strained.
For more on each of these plus some recommended exercises, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Beyond Stretching: Four Habits That Drastically Improve Mobility
Take care!
Share This Post
-
Could Just Two Hours Sleep Per Day Be Enough?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Polyphasic Sleep… Super-Schedule Or An Idea Best Put To Rest?
What is it?
Let’s start by defining some terms:
- Monophasic sleep—sleeping in one “chunk” per day. For example, a good night’s “normal” sleep.
- Biphasic sleep—sleeping in two “chunks” per day. Typically, a shorter night’s sleep, with a nap usually around the middle of the day / early afternoon.
- Polyphasic sleep—sleeping in two or more “chunks per day”. Some people do this in order to have more hours awake per day, to do things. The idea is that sleeping this way is more efficient, and one can get enough rest in less time. The most popular schedules used are:
- The Überman schedule—six evenly-spaced 20-minute naps, one every four hours, throughout the 24-hour day. The name is a semi-anglicized version of the German word Übermensch, “Superman”.
- The Everyman schedule—a less extreme schedule, that has a three-hours “long sleep” during the night, and three evenly-spaced 20-minute naps during the day, for a total of 4 hours sleep.
There are other schedules, but we’ll focus on the most popular ones here.
Want to learn about the others? Visit: Polyphasic.Net (a website by and for polyphasic sleep enthusiasts)
Some people have pointed to evidence that suggests humans are naturally polyphasic sleepers, and that it is only modern lifestyles that have forced us to be (mostly) monophasic.
There is at least some evidence to suggest that when environmental light/dark conditions are changed (because of extreme seasonal variation at the poles, or, as in this case, because of artificial changes as part of a sleep science experiment), we adjust our sleeping patterns accordingly.
The counterpoint, of course, is that perhaps when at the mercy of long days/nights at the poles, or no air-conditioning to deal with the heat of the day in the tropics, that perhaps we were forced to be polyphasic, and now, with modern technology and greater control, we are free to be monophasic.
Either way, there are plenty of people who take up the practice of polyphasic sleep.
Ok, But… Why?
The main motivation for trying polyphasic sleep is simply to have more hours in the day! It’s exciting, the prospect of having 22 hours per day to be so productive and still have time over for leisure.
A secondary motivation for trying polyphasic sleep is that when the brain is sleep-deprived, it will prioritize REM sleep. Here’s where the Überman schedule becomes perhaps most interesting:
The six evenly-spaced naps of the Überman schedule are each 20 minutes long. This corresponds to the approximate length of a normal REM cycle.
Consequently, when your head hits the pillow, you’ll immediately begin dreaming, and at the end of your dream, the alarm will go off.
Waking up at the end of a dream, when one hasn’t yet entered a non-REM phase of sleep, will make you more likely to remember it. Similarly, going straight into REM sleep will make you more likely to be aware of it, thus, lucid dreaming.
Read: Sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming (actually a very interesting and informative lucid dreaming study even if you don’t want to take up polyphasic sleep)
Six 20-minute lucid-dreaming sessions per day?! While awake for the other 22 hours?! That’s… 24 hours per day of wakefulness to use as you please! What sorcery is this?
Hence, it has quite an understandable appeal.
Next Question: Does it work?
Can we get by without the other (non-REM) kinds of sleep?
According to Überman cycle enthusiasts: Yes! The body and brain will adapt.
According to sleep scientists: No! The non-REM slow-wave phases of sleep are essential
Read: Adverse impact of polyphasic sleep patterns in humans—Report of the National Sleep Foundation sleep timing and variability consensus panel
(if you want to know just how bad it is… the top-listed “similar article” is entitled “Suicidal Ideation”)
But what about, for example, the Everman schedule? Three hours at night is enough for some non-REM sleep, right?
It is, and so it’s not as quickly deleterious to the health as the Überman schedule. But, unless you are blessed with rare genes that allow you to operate comfortably on 4 hours per day (you’ll know already if that describes you, without having to run any experiment), it’s still bad.
Adults typically need 7–9 hours of sleep per night, and if you don’t get it, you’ll accumulate a sleep debt. And, importantly:
When you accumulate sleep debt, you are borrowing time at a very high rate of interest!
And, at risk of laboring the metaphor, but this is important too:
Not only will you have to pay it back soon (with interest), you will be hounded by the debt collection agents—decreased cognitive ability and decreased physical ability—until you pay up.
In summary:
- Polyphasic sleep is really very tempting
- It will give you more hours per day (for a while)
- It will give the promised lucid dreaming benefits (which is great until you start micronapping between naps, this is effectively a mini psychotic break from reality lasting split seconds each—can be deadly if behind the wheel of a car, for instance!)
- It is unequivocally bad for the health and we do not recommend it
Bottom line:
Some of the claimed benefits are real, but are incredibly short-term, unsustainable, and come at a cost that’s far too high. We get why it’s tempting, but ultimately, it’s self-sabotage.
(Sadly! We really wanted it to work, too…)
Share This Post
-
An Accessible New Development Against Alzheimer’s
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Dopamine vs Alzheimer’s
One of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the formation of hardened beta-amyloid plaques around neurons. The beta-amyloid peptides themselves are supposed to be in the brain, but the hardened pieces of them that form the plaques are not.
While the full nature of the relationship between those plaques and Alzheimer’s disease is not known for sure (there are likely other factors involved, and “the amyloid hypothesis” is at this stage nominally just that, a hypothesis), one thing that has been observed is that increasing or reducing the plaques increases or reduces (respectively) Alzheimer’s symptoms such as memory loss.
Neprilysin
There is an enzyme, neprilysin, that can break down those plaques.
Neprilysin is made naturally in the brain, and/but we cannot take it as a supplement or medication, because it’s too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Takaomi Saido genetically manipulated mice to produce more neprilysin, and those mice resultantly experienced fewer beta-amyloid plaques and better memory in their old age.
However wonderful for the mice (and a great proof of principle) the above approach is not useful as a treatment for humans whose genomes weren’t modified at our conception in a lab.
Since (as mentioned before) we also can’t take it as a medication/supplement, that leaves one remaining option: find a way to make our already-existing brains produce more of it.
The team’s previous research allowed them to narrow this down to “there is probably a hormone made in the hypothalamus that modulates this”, so they began experimenting with making the mice produce more hormones there.
The DREADD switch
DREADDs, or Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs, were the next tool in the toolbox. The scientists attached these designer receptors to dopamine-producing neurons in the mice, so that they could be activated by the appropriate designer drugs—basically, allowing for a “make more dopamine” button, without having to literally wire up the brains with electrodes. The “button” gets triggered instead by a chemical trigger, the designer drug. You can read more about them here:
DREADDs for Neuroscientists: A Primer
The result was positive; when the mice made more dopamine, the result was that they also made more neprilysin. So far, the hypothesis is that the presence of dopamine upregulates the production of neprilysin. In other words, the increased neprilysin levels were caused by the increased dopamine levels (the alternatives would have been: they were both caused by the same thing—in this case that’d be the DREADD activation—or the increase was caused by something else entirely that hadn’t been controlled for).
As to how the causal relationship was determined…
“But I don’t have (or want) a DREADD switch in my head”
Happily for us (and probably happily for the mice too, because dopamine causes feelings of happiness), the experiments continued.
This time, instead of using the DREADD system, they tried simply supplementing the mouse food with l-dopa, a dopamine precursor. L-dopa is often used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, because the molecules are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, and can be converted to full dopamine inside the brain itself. So, taking l-dopa normally raises dopamine levels.
The results? The mice who were given l-dopa enjoyed:
- higher dopamine levels
- higher neprilysin levels
- lower beta-amyloid plaque levels
- better memory in tests
The next step for the researchers is to investigate how exactly dopamine regulates neprilysin in the brain, but for now, the relationship between l-dopa consumption and the reduction of Alzheimer’s symptoms seems clear.
You can read about the study here:
The dopaminergic system promotes neprilysin-mediated degradation of amyloid-β in the brain
Is there a catch?
L-dopa has common side effects that are not pleasant; the list begins with nausea and vomiting, and continues with things that one might expect from having “too much of a good thing” when it comes to dopamine, such as dyskinesia (extra movements) and hallucinations.
You can read about it more here at the Parkinson’s Foundation:
Parkinson’s Foundation | Levodopa
However! All is not lost. Rather than reaching for the heavy guns by taking l-dopa unnecessarily, there are other dopamine precursors that don’t have those side effects (and are consequently less restricted, to the point they can be purchased as supplements, or indeed, enjoyed where they occur naturally in some foods).
Top of the list of such safe* and readily-available dopamine precursors is…
N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine (NALT): The Dopamine Precursor & More
If you’d like to try that, here’s an example product on Amazon… Or you could eat fish, white beans, tofu, natto, or pumpkin seeds 😉
*Quick note on safety: “safe” is a relative term and may vary from person to person. Please speak with your own doctor to be sure, check with your pharmacist in case of any meds interactions, and be especially careful taking anything that increases dopamine levels if you have bipolar disorder or are otherwise prone to psychosis of any kind. For most people, this shouldn’t be an issue as our brains have a built-in mechanism for scrubbing excess dopamine and ensuring we don’t end up with too much, but for some people whose dopamine regulation is not so good in that regard, it can cause problems. So again, speak with your doctor to be sure, because we are not doctors, let alone your doctor.
Lastly…
If you’d like an entirely drug-free approach, that’s skipping even the “nutraceuticals”, you might enjoy:
Short On Dopamine? Science Has The Answer
Take care!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
‘Active recovery’ after exercise is supposed to improve performance – but does it really work?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Imagine you have just finished a workout. Your legs are like jelly, your lungs are burning and you just want to collapse on the couch.
But instead, you pick yourself up and go for a brisk walk.
While this might seem counterintuitive, doing some light activity after an intense workout – known as “active recovery” – has been suggested to reduce soreness and speed up recovery after exercise.
But does it work or is it just another fitness myth?
gpointstudio/Shutterstock What is active recovery?
Active recovery simply describes doing some low-intensity physical activity after a strenuous bout of exercise.
This is commonly achieved through low-intensity cardio, such as walking or cycling, but can also consist of low-intensity stretching, or even bodyweight exercises such as squats and lunges.
The key thing is making sure the intensity is light or moderate, without moving into the “vigorous” range.
As a general rule, if you can maintain a conversation while you’re exercising, you are working at a light-to-moderate intensity.
Some people consider doing an easy training session on their “rest days” as a form of active recovery. However, this has not really been researched. So we will be focusing on the more traditional form of active recovery in this article, where it is performed straight after exercise.
What does active recovery do?
Active recovery helps speed up the removal of waste products, such as lactate and hydrogen, after exercise. These waste products are moved from the muscles into the blood, before being broken down and used for energy, or simply excreted.
This is thought to be one of the ways it promotes recovery.
In some instances active recovery has been shown to reduce muscle soreness in the days following exercise. This may lead to a faster return to peak performance in some physical capabilities such as jump height.
Active recovery can involve stretching. fatir29/Shutterstock But, active recovery does not appear to reduce post-exercise inflammation. While this may sound like a bad thing, it’s not.
Post-exercise inflammation can promote increases in strength and fitness after exercise. And so when it’s reduced (say, by using ice baths after exercise) this can lead to smaller training improvements than would be seen otherwise.
This means active recovery can be used regularly after exercise without the risk of affecting the benefits of the main exercise session.
There’s evidence to the contrary too
Not all research on active recovery is positive.
Several studies indicate it’s no better than simply lying on the couch when it comes to reducing muscle soreness and improving performance after exercise.
In fact, there’s more research suggesting active recovery doesn’t have an effect than research showing it does have an effect.
While there could be several reasons for this, two stand out.
First, the way in which active recovery is applied in the research varies as lot. It’s likely there is a sweet spot in terms of how long active recovery should last to maximise its benefits (more on this later).
Second, it’s likely the benefits of active recovery are trivial to small. As such, they won’t always be considered “significant” in the scientific literature, despite offering potentially meaningful benefits at an individual level. In sport science, studies often have small sample sizes, which can make it hard to see small effects.
But there doesn’t seem to be any research suggesting active recovery is less effective than doing nothing, so at worst it certainly won’t cause any harm.
When is active recovery useful?
Active recovery appears useful if you need to perform multiple bouts of exercise within a short time frame. For example, if you were in a tournament and had 10–20 minutes between games, then a quick active recovery would be better than doing nothing.
Active recovery might also be a useful strategy if you have to perform exercise again within 24 hours after intense activity.
For example, if you are someone who plays sport and you need to play games on back-to-back days, doing some low-intensity active recovery after each game might help reduce soreness and improve performance on subsequent days.
Similarly, if you are training for an event like a marathon and you have a training session the day after a particularly long or intense run, then active recovery might get you better prepared for your next training session.
Conversely, if you have just completed a low-to-moderate intensity bout of exercise, it’s unlikely active recovery will offer the same benefits. And if you will get more than 24 hours of rest between exercise sessions, active recovery is unlikely to do much because this will probably be long enough for your body to recover naturally anyway.
Active recovery may be useful for people with back-to-back sporting commitments. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock How to get the most out of active recovery
The good news is you don’t have to do a lot of active recovery to see a benefit.
A systematic review looking at the effectiveness of active recovery across 26 studies found 6–10 minutes of exercise was the sweet spot when it came to enhancing recovery.
Interestingly, the intensity of exercise didn’t seem to matter. If it was within this time frame, it had a positive effect.
So it makes sense to make your active recovery easy (because why would you make it hard if you don’t have to?) by keeping it in the light-to-moderate intensity range.
However, don’t expect active recovery to be a complete game changer. The research would suggest the benefits are likely to be small at best.
Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia and Lewis Ingram, Lecturer in Physiotherapy, University of South Australia
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
The Snooze-Button Controversy
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
To Snooze Or Not To Snooze? (Science Has Answers)
This is Dr. Jennifer Kanaan. She’s a medical doctor with a focus on pulmonary critical care, sleep disorders, and sleep medicine.
What does she want to tell us?
She wants us to be wary of the many news articles that have jumped on a certain recent sleep study, such as:
- Is hitting the snooze button really a bad idea? Study sheds light on the impact of morning alarms on sleep and cognition
- Hitting Snooze May Help You Feel Less Sleepy and More Alert, Research Says
- Is it okay to press the snooze button?
- Hitting Snooze May Help You Feel Less Sleepy and More Alert, Research Says
- Hitting the snooze button on your alarm doesn’t make you more tired
For the curious, here is the paper itself, by Dr. Tina Sundelin et al. It’s actually two studies, by the way, but one paper:
The authors of this study concluded:
❝There were no clear effects of snoozing on the cortisol awakening response, morning sleepiness, mood, or overnight sleep architecture.
A brief snooze period may thus help alleviate sleep inertia, without substantially disturbing sleep, for late chronotypes and those with morning drowsiness.❞
Notably, people tend to snooze because an alarm clock will, if not “smart” about it, wake us up mid sleep-cycle more often than not, and that will produce a short “sleep hangover”. By snoozing, we are basically re-rolling the dice on being woken up between sleep cycles, and thus feeling more refreshed.
What’s Dr. Kanaan’s counterpoint?
Dr. Kanaan says:
❝If you’re coming in and out of sleep for 30 minutes, after the alarm goes off the first time, you’re costing yourself 30 minutes of uninterrupted, quality, restorative sleep. This study doesn’t change that fact.❞
She advises that rather than snoozing, we should prioritize getting good sleep in the first place, and once we do wake up, mid sleep-cycle or not, get sunlight. That way, our brain will start promptly scrubbing melatonin and producing the appropriate wakefulness hormones instead. That means serotonin, and also a spike of cortisol.
Remember: cortisol is only bad when it’s chronically elevated. It’s fine, and even beneficial, to have a short spike of cortisol. We make it for a reason!
If you’d like to hear more from Dr. Kanaan, you might like this interview with her at the University of Connecticut:
Want the best of both worlds?
A great option to avoid getting woken in the middle of a sleep cycle, and also not needing to hit snooze, is a sunrise alarm clock. Specifics of these devices vary, but for example, the kind this writer has starts gently glowing an hour before the set alarm time,and gradually gets brighter and lighter over the course of the hour.
We don’t sell them, but here’s an example sunrise alarm clock on Amazon, for your convenience
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
5 Movements You’ll Wish You’d Known Sooner
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Alisa Szyman, mobility coach, shows us why:
Best for mobility, best against pain
These movements are what’s needed for good mobility (range of motion, flexibility, strength, stability) while also being a top-tier way of combatting pain, due to what they do for the body’s natural functions.
Specifically, the exercises are intended to build on one another, beginning with neck stability, then restoring upper-back rotation, activating your glutes, improving hip control, and finally reducing hamstring and posterior-chain tightness:
- Chin tucks: stand tall, bring your chin slightly forwards, then push it straight back to create a double chin while keeping your head level, and follow with slow shoulder shrugs by lifting your shoulders towards your ears and lowering them under control.
- Quadruped thoracic rotations: start on all fours with one hand on the floor and the other extended to the side, rotate through your upper back to lift the arm towards the ceiling while following it with your eyes, then return to the start position.
- Glute bridges: lie on your back with your knees bent and feet flat, squeeze your glutes before lifting your hips, hold briefly at the top, then lower slowly while keeping the effort in your glutes rather than your lower back.
- Hip CARs (controlled articular rotations): stand or kneel, lift one knee and slowly move your hip through its fullest circular range while keeping your spine and upper body still, then repeat in both directions on each side.
- Sciatic nerve flossing: lie on your back with one knee bent and your foot flat on the floor, raise the other leg towards the ceiling, then gently flex and point your foot or make slow ankle circles, to glide the sciatic nerve through its range of motion.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Best Mobility Drills For Posture & Pain Relief
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
