Mum sings every word of hymns but can't tell me her address. Is there something in this or is it a party trick?

#1Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)October 12, 2025, 6:22 pm

Sunday afternoon, the home has a thing they call music hour, and my mother sang the whole of Abide With Me. All the verses. In tune, in time, no hesitation, and she came in on the pickup before the pianist did.

Ten minutes later she asked me twice where she lived and then asked if I had come far, and I have come from the same house I have come from for eleven years.

I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Half of me wants to believe I saw something real, that she is more in there than the last eighteen months have suggested. The other half thinks I am the twelfth relative that month to walk out of a music hour convinced of the same thing, and that the staff have seen this a hundred times and are just too kind to say so.

So which is it. Is there something in the singing or is it essentially a party trick that the brain does and it means nothing about anything?

#2mikeatthepiano(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)October 12, 2025, 8:04 pm

I play in three homes a fortnight and I see it most weeks. Whatever it is, it is not rare and it is not a trick.

#3stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)October 14, 2025, 9:11 am

Half agreeing and half asking, in the spirit of the board.

The activities coordinator at my brother's home told a room of relatives, in these words, that music therapy is recommended by NICE and that it reduces agitation. She had a laminated sheet. Everybody nodded, me included, and I have repeated it since to at least two people.

Where does that come from though? I have gone looking twice now and I cannot find it, and I would rather know than keep saying it. And the second half of it bothers me more than the first, because agitation is exactly the thing families are desperate about and it is the claim I hear most.

#4Dr Rhian VaughanMusic therapist moderator(Joined May 2024 · 91 posts)October 16, 2025, 1:47 pm

Taking the second question first, because it is the one with a clean answer, and then the harder one.

The NICE claim is not there. NG97 is the dementia guideline, and a full text search of it returns zero occurrences of music, art, dance, drama or creative activity. The guideline does discuss non pharmacological approaches to distress in general terms and it is not hostile to any of this, but "NICE recommends music therapy" is a claim that document does not contain, and there is no weaker true version of it either. It is the most repeated false citation in this field and it turns up in funding bids, service descriptions and laminated sheets, almost always in good faith. So please do stop repeating it, and be gentle with whoever told you.

Now the evidence, and I am going to keep what the trials found separate from what I see in a room, because they answer different questions.

The current Cochrane review of music based therapeutic interventions for people with dementia is CD003477.pub5, published on 7 March 2025, and it pools 30 studies with 1,720 participants randomised. On depressive symptoms it reports a standardised mean difference of -0.23, with a 95 percent confidence interval of -0.42 to -0.04, at moderate certainty. That is a real effect and it is a small one, roughly a fifth of a standard deviation.

On agitation and aggression it reports -0.05, with an interval of -0.27 to 0.17, also at moderate certainty. That is the important number and it is the one your coordinator had backwards. A narrow interval sitting on zero, at moderate certainty, is not "more research is needed". It is a finding of absence, and it is a stronger statement than an empty file would be. Agitation is the outcome claimed for music in dementia more than any other, and the current review does not support it.

Two more things from the same review that families are rarely told. There is no evidence of any effect persisting four weeks after the sessions stop, and that is a different kind of gap from the agitation one: nobody has demonstrated persistence, rather than persistence having been shown not to happen. And the review contains no separate estimate for quality of life at all, so any quality of life figure you see attributed to it has been imported from somewhere else. If you are ever handed 22 studies and 1,097 participants, that is the superseded 2018 version, which reached a different conclusion on agitation and is still being quoted everywhere.

One boundary on all of that. The review is of music based therapeutic interventions, which is a category and not a synonym for a session with a registered therapist. The pooled answer belongs to the category, not to any particular member of it, and it does not transfer to a Sunday afternoon music hour in either direction. Quoting the depression finding in a leaflet for a community singing group would be wrong, and so would telling your mother's home that research has shown singing does not help her.

Now your actual question, and here I am answering as somebody who does this work rather than as somebody quoting a review. Preserved singing where speech has largely gone is ordinary in my caseload. Not universal, but common enough that it stopped surprising me years ago, and common enough that it is described repeatedly in the clinical literature. What I am not going to do is hand you a tidy mechanism for it as though the explanation were settled, because it is not, and a confident sentence about how the brain stores songs is exactly the sort of thing that gets repeated for a decade.

What I will say is that "party trick" implies the person is absent and something automatic is happening in front of you. That is not what the phrasing you described sounds like. Coming in on the pickup before the pianist is timing, and timing is participation. I would take that seriously without deciding what it proves.

I have not met your mother and I am not going to comment on her. Anything about what she can do, or should be offered, belongs with the people who see her. Music therapy for dementia has the review set out properly with the intervals and the certainty ratings, including the parts I have just given you that cut against the enthusiasm.

#5Yusuf A.(Joined Aug 2025 · 11 posts)October 17, 2025, 8:30 am

The four week thing is the bit I would want on a poster in every care home foyer, and not for the reason people assume.

If nothing has been shown to persist a month after the sessions end, then a visiting musician who comes for six weeks because a grant paid for six weeks is not a small version of the good thing. It is a different thing. The argument that follows from the evidence is for something that keeps happening, not for a one off, and that is an argument about funding rather than about music.

#6Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)November 20, 2025, 7:58 pm

A month on and I am somewhere in between, which I think is where I am supposed to be.

I have stopped telling my sister that the singing means Mum is still in there, because that was doing something to both of us and I could not have defended it. I have also stopped feeling foolish about the afternoon, which is the part I did not expect from this thread. Timing is participation. I have thought about that sentence a lot.

The home has a singing group on Thursdays run by a volunteer and I had been treating it as filler between the real appointments. I have started going with her instead of dropping her off. Dementia choirs and singing groups is clear that there is no effect size for those groups specifically, which I would rather know than not, and I am going anyway.