Music and the Mind: Music Therapy in Neurodegenerative Treatment
Advisor: Mr. Rappelfeld
Do you have a song that takes you back to middle school? An album you always play to wind down after a long day? From sparking old memories to activating a dopamine release, music proves to play an influential role in the brain and a promising form of therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Today, millions face the difficult symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, with the disease only projected to grow more prevalent over the coming years. Due to this increase in need, inexpensive and simple treatment such as music can greatly ameliorate symptoms (including sundowning, agitation, and confusion) and assist with the demanding processes of typical medicinal care. To conduct this project, I will host weekly interviews with music therapists, continue extensive online research, and observe the general benefits of music therapy through work with the Life Story Club. With this incredible non-profit working to tackle the loneliness epidemic among older adults, I will take part in music-based virtual clubs, where I plan to design personalized playlists for them to use in their daily lives. From there, I will survey those involved and observe how music helps increase happiness and quality of life for seniors, which I will then apply to ADRD. I hope to find an increase in mental well-being among participants. I aim to use these findings to open people’s eyes to the promises of music therapy and give back to our aging populations, especially those with ADRD.
Project Blog
Week 0: Introduction
Hello. My name is Alexa, and welcome to my senior project blog. I joined BASIS in 1st grade, and I have been lucky enough to watch myself and the school grow over the past twelve years. For my senior project, I will study the promises of music therapy in dementia and Alzheimer’s disease care. I first became interested in this topic last year, when I found that my love for music and my love for neuroscience could intersect. I have been playing the guitar for nearly as long as I’ve been a student at BASIS, and, as an avid music lover, I have always wondered how exactly music interacts with our minds. For this project, I will focus on Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD), for which there is no cure yet many promising, non-invasive treatments to manage common side effects such as agitation, confusion, and sundowning syndrome. Over the next three months, I will conduct interviews with music therapists, continue extensive online research, and work with Life Story Club to implement music into older adults’ daily lives. With these methods, I hope to understand the neuroscience behind music therapy, while also understanding how music can be brought to a greater population of aging adults and caretakers. As someone whose family has been heavily affected by the difficulties of caring for those with dementia, I hope to bring my findings to the general public through a publicly shared “guide,” detailing how caretakers can implement music therapy into their everyday care, opening their eyes to the simple, inexpensive, and effective uses of music therapy.
Week 1: Looking into Music and the Brain
Hello and welcome back to my blog! This week marked the official start to my senior project. Although my AP Psychology mock exam took up the majority of my Monday, I dove straight into my project by beginning on my readings and building my general plan for the next few months. I began drafting my standard questions which I will use for my music therapist interviews, for which I have also begun planning interviewees. Next week we will send out emails requesting these interviews.
On Wednesday, I was able to go into the Life Story Club office and start working. As I briefly mentioned last time, the Life Story Club works to combat the loneliness epidemic by providing a community for older adults. This typically includes weekly Zoom meetings with one Life Story Club volunteer/member facilitating the call and around 6 club members (groups determined by region and/or background) sharing their life stories centered around a relevant and interesting prompt.
On Wednesday, however, I was able to sit in on two club meetings, where I greatly enjoyed listening to members’ stories of luck and female inspirations (the two prompts for those meetings) and getting to add in my own stories as well. In my first session, I got the chance to mention my project and my interest in music, and every participant lit up when they got the chance to speak about their love for music. Their similar enthusiasm made me even more excited to begin my full music-based meetings.
In discussing my project, my on-site advisor Ezra Gates and I began by outlining my duties as an intern, for which I will not only help with my weekly club meetings, but also help alleviate some friction in the organization’s tedious tasks (ex: helping patch participants into the Zoom meeting). Starting next week, I will co-facilitate club meetings on Mondays (with the music-based LGBTQ+ club group) and Fridays (where I will begin a “limited run” of music-based sessions with club members). In both of these groups, our prompts will be music related, and my goal is to understand first-hand how music is incorporated into, and has impacted, these older adults’ lives, a key point in my project. Next week, I will work with a team of Life Story Club meeting facilitators to plan prompt ideas and brainstorm how to incorporate music into my Friday club meetings.
For my readings, I officially started Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness by Renée Fleming, where the forward—much like my progress in the senior project so far—focused primarily on the background to music therapy and the author’s observations of music having an influence in the brain. I look forward to reading more from Fleming, a renowned opera singer who contributed greatly to Sound Health—a collaboration between the (then) Kennedy Center and the National Institutes of Health to bring together neuroscientists and musicians—to gain a more general understanding of music therapy from a variety of perspectives, a diversity which I also hope to bring into my final project.
Additionally, I read “Alone in the Dark” by Carolyn Sayre, where I began looking at music therapy in a clinical setting. In this article, Sayre looks at the impact of music therapy on dementia care, using specific examples primarily from a nursing home resident: Beatrice. This piece reflects my goals for my own project, and so I will continue to take inspiration from Sayre as I create a well-rounded insight into music therapy.
Next week, I will begin preparing for my Friday music sessions (creating prompts and getting acclimated with the group) while also hopefully starting interviews/set times for interviews. I am very excited to continue laying the foundations of my project and to dive deeper into dementia and music therapy, as this week was focused on the general application of music in the brain.
For more, please read my senior project proposal.
Week 2: Starting my groups!
Welcome back to my blog! This week was an exciting one, where I got to do a lot of work at my placement, the Life Story Club. I started out the week by joining my first Monday music-based group, from which I will collect some details about the impact of music in participants’ lives. This Monday group focused on music in LGBTQ+ lives, where Life Story Club members shared songs that represented them. One participant chose Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker,” one of my personal favorites! This was a super fun session where I got to simply spend an hour discussing my love for music with older adults of the Life Story Club.
Additionally, I began planning my Friday group, for which, as I mentioned in my last blog, I will be curating to focus on music and the brain. Over six weeks (starting 4/10), I will be hosting weekly sessions for Life Story Club members to share stories about music in their lives, where each session will include a music-inspired prompt (created by me!) to get the conversation started. In these sessions, everyone (including myself) will share a song/story related to the prompt, and at the end of the hour I will share a neuroscience-based “Music Fact of the Day” based on my research that I have done earlier in that week! In order to supplement participants’ spoken words, I crafted a short survey for participants to complete before their first music-based session and after their last. Today I will collect the first responses to agree/disagree questions including, “music has been a resource I have turned to over the years,” and “I would be open to using music therapy in my everyday life.” This survey will help me gauge not only how older adults are already using music but also their understanding of music’s benefits and how willing they are to actually utilize them. These findings will be crucial to how I structure my final guide, as they will demonstrate the generalized need for music therapy and the reality of how it can be incorporated into more lives. Let’s see how it goes!
On Monday, I also read “Music as Therapy," where I got a quick overview of the benefits of music in a variety of treatments, including infant development, pain relief, hospice care, and more. This paper is a great launching pad for my research, where I will continue diving into the specific uses of music therapy, especially in Alzheimer’s care, as I read about in “Music Intervention Approaches for Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review of the Literature." This paper synthesizes information from six selected studies on the use of active music therapy, music listening, and general music-based interventions and reviews how different forms of music listening/therapy can benefit or affect cognition and/or behavior in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. As I am just beginning my project, it is important for me to begin with literature reviews and broader-focus papers as I dive into my topic. Next week I will begin reading more neuroscience-based studies and narrow down my research.
After the break, I will begin my first round of interviews and finalize my Friday group plans as I host my first session on April 10th! See you then!
Week 3: Broadening my focus
Hello again! Before spring break, I developed a short survey to be sent out to my Friday music group participants at the Life Story Club, and following our preliminary group call, I received a few responses and now have a better understanding of older adults’ connection to music. I will include the data from this survey in my final presentation, but for now I hope to observe how these individuals connect with the music which we will be listening to and discussing in our weekly groups. After our six group meetings, I will present the same survey (including questions such as “music has been a resource I have turned to over the years,” and “I would be open to using music therapy in my everyday life”) and see how attitudes towards music and music therapy have changed with more exposure. Today I will be hosting the first of six music-based sessions with this group of older adults, where we will discuss how music affects our mood. Next week I will share how this first session goes!
On Monday, I also attended my weekly Monday music-based group, where we discussed songs that remind us of important people or times in our lives. This group of older adults is incredibly thoughtful, and it is always wonderful to hear them discuss difficult times in their lives through the medium of music.
This week I finally completed my first music therapist interview! On Thursday, I sat down over Zoom with licensed music therapist Brianna Jones to speak about her work specializing in music therapy for preschool-age children with developmental and intellectual disabilities. I enjoyed getting to speak with someone so knowledgeable and passionate about music, and I learned a lot about this alternate side of music therapy. Though most of my work has centered around older adults, I am excited to incorporate neurodevelopmental perspectives into my final presentation, as, based on my conversation with Brianna, music therapy can provide a low-stress, music-empowered environment for children with intellectual disabilities to focus on their social interactions and communication skills.
Inspired by our conversation, I read “Music Therapy for Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and/or Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Systematic Review." In this paper, an analysis of thirty-nine studies found that social interaction, adult-child relationships, and reading comprehension in those with dyslexia seem to have improved in multiple studies and deserve more focus in the future. Following my interview, I found these results fascinating, especially because I could see the empirical data behind Brianna’s work.
Finally, I also read “Positron-Emission Tomography of Brain Regions Activated by Recognition of Familiar Music." This study used Positron-Emission Tomography (PET), a non-invasive method to measure metabolic activity and blood flow through the organs, to study the movement of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) when participants listened to familiar music. After having participants complete both a familiarity task (recognizing a famous nursery rhyme) and an alteration-detection task (locating the altered note in the same well-known melodies as the familiarity task), researchers found that multiple temporal lobe regions aid in our recognition of familiar melodies. If you are interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading through this study. It was fascinating, and researchers went in depth into the numerous regions of the brain that take part in music listening and recognition!
Week 4: First Friday group
Welcome to week 4! Since my last blog, I hosted my first music-based Friday group! Although it was my first time leading the discussion, it went incredibly well. We had a great turnout (including one woman who specifically made time just so she could “get in on this music discussion”), and we worked through how music impacts our mood. The question “What is a song that reminds you of a positive moment in your life?” and “What is a song you have turned to during a difficult time in your life? How does this song affect or uplift your mood?” guided our conversation. Not only were the older adults beaming with joy when talking about their favorite songs, but I also got a deepened understanding of how they listen to music. For one woman who has been diagnosed as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), classical music is the only genre she can tolerate, however she still finds her classical music, which she plays in the background of regular activities, to be extremely therapeutic in her daily life. This is a sensitivity factor which I have to consider in my comprehensive review, as a significant percentage of Americans are HSP.
I certainly learned from this incredible discussion, and the members even gave me homework on fun topics to research for next time (including the benefits of the cello, piano, and kazoo on brain function). This research was fascinating, and I went deeper into the effects of playing music on our fine motor skills and how music’s full-brain “workout” improves communication between our two hemispheres by strengthening activity of the corpus callosum.
Our next session will be focused on music and memory, as we discuss how different songs remind us of the springtime (a timely topic for this transition into warm weather). Check back next week to see how that discussion goes!
On Thursday, I hosted my second interview, this time with renowned pianist and staff therapist at the New York University Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy, Renate Rohlfing. Although she could only speak for 15 minutes, we had an amazing discussion about the variety of music therapy and the importance of integrating music into our lives, especially for adolescents. Renate (alongside Olivia Cosío) leads Sounds That Carry, an organization devoted to strengthening community arts programing, and I greatly enjoyed getting to speak to Renate about the importance of this work, especially as arts funding is dwindling.
For my readings, I focused on “Regular Music Exposure in Juvenile Rats Facilitates Conditioned Fear Extinction and Reduces Anxiety after Foot Shock in Adulthood” by Chen et al., another fascinating paper. In this experiment, researchers measured anxiety in 78 juvenile rats (split into two groups: one exposed to music (experimental), another with just ambient music (control)) by examining their behaviors in an Elevated Plus Maze test and in an Open Field test before and after fear conditioning (light electric shocks). Although the electric shocks feel inhumane, this experiment did provide evidence that music exposure in rats facilitates fear extinction and increased brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which can strengthen neural connections. This is great data for my project, and these results are very promising in that music might have the same effect in humans.
On top of all of this work, I kept up with my Monday group and helped with assorted intern tasks at the Life Story Club. I’ll see you next time!
Week 5: Readings and recommendations
Hello and welcome back! This week was a busy yet interesting one, as I dove deeper into my readings and continued on with our weekly groups. Last Friday, I held my second music group with an enthusiastic bunch of participants from the Life Story Club! We spent the hour discussing music and the springtime (largely due to the beautiful weather in New York last week) and how we tie sounds to different emotions and memories. Many individuals spoke about the hopefulness of the lyrics in “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and the “colors” of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” concerto. As we listened to each selection, everybody’s faces lit up, and the conversation was lively! It was a truly enjoyable session, and I learned more about how the memories brought back through these pieces play a large role in how we listen to them today. Because we began looking at music and memory last week, today we will focus on music that brings us back to a monumental period in our lives. I can’t wait to hear all the stories that are to come!
Similarly, my Monday group has been a consistent joy, as every week I watch them share more personal stories through the medium of music. They are a very dynamic group, and I always love the music selections from them (this week my favorite was Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be”).
For my readings, I started the week with a topic requested by my Friday group, as they became interested in how different instruments can play different roles in the brain. In reading “Brain Plasticity Reflects Specialized Cognitive Development Induced by Musical Training," I learned that playing the piano and playing different wind instruments (the two groups studied) are each associated with different regions of the brain. Although all instruments activate the somatosensory cortex and promote its development, researchers found trends of piano training with functioning/development in the superior temporal gyrus (associated with agreeableness), Heschl’s gyrus (used for processing sound frequency), and Rolandic operculum (connected to apathy, depression, anxiety), while wind players had a more active thalamus (emotion) and putamen (linked to mood, motivation). This is a very interesting study that focuses more on the methods we use for music/music therapy and how different forms of playing can influence the brain in unique ways.
Additionally, I also read “Music and Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease and The Potential Underlying Mechanisms” by Peck et al. in order to better understand the “how” and “why” of music in the brain. For anyone interested in the basics of music therapy, this is a great piece to read, as it is a comprehensive overview of how music plays a role in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (which processes fear and emotional inhibition), the orbitofrontal cortex (which is activated for emotion and reward in decision making), as well as structures in the emotional limbic system. Because music activates these regions which are also frequently impacted by AD, it is a very promising tool in ameliorating cognitive dysfunction. As with my goal for this project, the author emphasizes the need for further research into music therapy, as a low-cost and accessible intervention such as music could greatly improve cognitive function, boost quality of life, and it could truly change lives.
Week 6: Halfway mark!
Hello again! As I approach the halfway mark, I’ve been working hard to continue my work from the past month and begin the transition into presentation planning!
As I mentioned in my most recent blog, last Friday I hosted my regular music group with the Life Story Club. This time, we spent the hour discussing music and memories. My goal for this discussion was to see how older adults tie experiences to the “soundtrack” of that moment in their lives, and how listening to these songs now evokes strong, reminiscent feelings. We had an amazing discussion, as two participants focused on the music behind their marriages. One woman spoke about her emotional connection to her husband’s old favorite song, Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Additionally, one individual still remembered the Yiddish songs that her father would sing to her as a child, demonstrating the power of musical memory. I am looking forward to this week’s group on our evolving musical preferences, and I cannot wait to bring these powerful stories into my final presentation on the impact of music in the brain.
This week, I began planning for my Life Story Club interviews, where I will soon speak one-on-one with members of my Friday group about their personal connections to music, hoping to learn new information that they have not shared with the larger group. I also aim to get their input on my final presentable, as my eventual guide to music therapy will target their demographic. It is for this reason that their point of view on presentation, content, and accessibility is paramount to the efficacy of my final product. Next week I will have more details on this opportunity!
For my readings, I started the week with “Overture for Growth Hormone: Requiem for interleukin-6?” to understand some possible mechanisms behind music and the brain. In this neuroscience-based paper, experimenters measured physical and cognitive changes before and after music listening sessions for critically ill patients undergoing sedation for surgery. The goal of this study was to identify the methods with which music can induce relaxation. By dividing participants into one music group (the experimental group listening to Mozart’s sonatas) and one control group (with no music while being sedated), researchers were able to pinpoint statistically significant differences between the two groups. In summary, they found that the experimental group did not require additional sedatives whereas the control group did, interleukin-6 levels (high levels of IL-6 are associated with inflammation and increases with stress) decreased by 83% in the music group while remaining unchanged in the control, and epinephrine levels (associated with stress response) fell 55% in the music while not changing in the control. I highly recommend checking this paper out if you are interested in the biological side of music therapy (which I will touch on in my presentation)!
This was another great week, and I am now thinking about my final presentation and guide while I prepare for the interviews, groups, and even an in-person Life Story Club meet-up that is to come. See you next time!
Week 7: Bringing it all together
Happy first full week of May! This week was a fun one, as I began thinking ahead to the coming (final) weeks of my project.
As I near the one month out mark, I am focused on structuring and organizing information for my final guide. I am deciding on the broad topics to touch on, where I will need to balance breadth while also being able to catch (and hold onto) readers’ attention. I am anticipating the guide will take the most time, so I am hoping to start constructing it late next week. It will be an exciting and worthwhile venture, though, to take my studies from the past few months and condense them to share with larger populations! For this I am also beginning to schedule my one-on-one interviews with Life Story Club participants to get true opinions on my guide once I have a draft.
Much of my work this week was also focused on our in-person Life Story Club event on Wednesday! Although my music groups were not in attendance, I had an amazing time speaking with the older adults and seeing the culmination of the team’s work! Seeing the 50 or so older adults so happy reminded me of the importance of this internship and that there is a real demand for activities, such as in-person events and music, that promote happiness and social bonding. Hopefully the wonderful people I spoke to yesterday will receive my guide in June and incorporate music into their own lives.
And finally, of course, I have continued with my weekly groups! Last Friday we had a smaller gathering, but I managed to have a great, more personal conversation where we dove into some specifics of music in the brain. As always, I am excited to bring these unique perspectives into my final product (the guide) and presentation. This week is actually our second to last Friday music group! We will focus on the songs we listen to on-repeat/are moved by, ideally diving into the difference between listening to music actively vs passively. We will tackle the question of whether or not we have to listen attentively to these songs, or if their presence is enough to feel emotionally moved by them. This will be important for focusing my guide as—based on the older adults’ responses—I will add recommendations for the forms of listening that seem the most effective, potentially for a larger population, too (although the efficacy of different forms does vary from individual to individual). I have a feeling this prompt will evoke a fun conversation!
Next week I will start on my guide, hopefully continue some interviews (despite therapists’ busy schedules), and look forward to the final few weeks! See you then!
Week 8: Music on Quality of Life
Welcome back to my blog! Despite this week being busy with AP exams, I still managed to take a ton of exciting steps forward in my research!
To start, last Friday I hosted my second to last music group with the Life Story Club. The topic was “On Repeat,” where we shared the songs/pieces of art that have stuck in our minds and kept us going through difficult times in our lives. As always, these selections became very diverse, ranging from Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” to “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from "Carousel,” to a beautiful ballet piece by Kimin Kim. Everybody had a smile on their faces as they shared some of their all-time favorite songs, and they all enjoyed hearing each other's stories of when these pieces came into their lives. I cannot believe that this limited music group is coming to a close! I will miss this Friday group.
I am lucky, though, that I do not have to say goodbye just yet! Starting in two weeks, I will be interviewing select members of my Friday group in order to gain their insight into how digestible and effective my guide/final product is. Next week I will be working hard on finishing a first draft of this guide so that I can share it with these older adults and gain opinions from the target demographic on how well my guide matches my goals for it. Stay tuned for updates on that!
Speaking of interviews, I have also scheduled two more discussions with music therapists for next week, so keep an eye out for next week’s post where I will share some amazing professional insight from two licensed music therapists in the tri-state area.
As always, I continued my readings this week. I read papers on musical interventions on Autism Spectrum Disorder, insomnia, depression, and dementia in order to broaden the scope of my presentation while focusing on the effects of music on quality of life. One interesting paper I read was “A Randomized Controlled Trial Exploring the Effect of Music on Quality of Life and Depression in Older People with Dementia," an extensive deep-dive into music’s effect on Dementia Quality of Life (DQoL) and on Geriatric Depression Scale scores compared to a control group that participated in daily reading sessions instead. Contrary to some of my other readings, researchers did not find a significant conclusion on how much more effective than reading music is on DQoL. However, researchers concluded that, considering a lack of adverse effects in the experimental group, music interventions did improve sense of belonging, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms in some dementia patients. While these effects may not have been significantly greater in the music vs the reading group, music still made a lasting impact in the brain.
I am looking forward to more interviews, more readings, and more stories to share next week. See you then!
Week 10: Thank you Life Story Club!
Happy Friday! We are officially in the final stretch of the project! It is such a bittersweet feeling to have everything come to a close, but I am looking forward to sharing all of my hard work soon.
This week was my last week interning with Life Story Club. Although I already shared all of my thank yous with the team, these past two and a half months have been truly special, and I will miss everyone I worked with at Life Story Club and all the older adults who I got to meet with each week. It was a truly unforgettable experience, I encourage everyone to check out, volunteer for, and take part in the organization here.
Today, however, I am actually speaking with a few of my Life Story Club group members to get their opinions on the first draft of my guide. Through these conversations, I hope to get external opinions on the legibility, aesthetic, and clarity of the guide, ultimately making sure that people would realistically apply information from the guide to their real lives.
Once I get a solid draft with the older adults’ thoughts incorporated, I will also be sending it out to the therapists and researchers who I interviewed a few weeks ago, in order to get their professional opinions on it as well. My goal is to finalize my guide early next week as I wrap up these conversations. Then I finally get to share it!
On top of my final deliverable, I have also been focused on my presentation. As I wrap up my internship, I am starting to bring everything together and focus on how to condense the past three months into a 30-minute presentation and convey my final points. That is my focus for the next several days as I prepare for the real thing!
Week 11: Presentations and Practice
Welcome to the final stretch of my senior project! These past three months have been incredibly valuable for me on so many levels, and I am excited to put everything together for my presentation next week.
As I begin wrapping everything up, I am currently adding finishing touches on both my presentation and my final deliverable. For this deliverable (my Music & Mind guide), I have been toying around with the layout and legibility, as one of my main goals is for it to be accessible and understandable. In order to achieve this, I collaborated with two key members of my Friday Life Story Club group. Late last week, these older adults sent their opinions on the quality and structure of my guide, and they had a few notes on the display of information. One individual suggested I add some more small images, specifically in the final section of the guide, but both older adults said that the guide was very eye-catching and easy to follow. I was especially moved by one of the older adults saying my work was “beyond what you’d expect at the high school level.” This feedback (and more) is crucial to me developing a product of quality, and I greatly appreciate their eagerness to contribute to my final deliverable!
It is difficult to create a comprehensive yet focused guide with just one page, however I do think I am in the final drafts of it now that I have implemented the few notes that my Life Story Club members shared. Next week I will begin sharing it!
On top of my Music & Mind guide, I spent the greater part of this week crafting my final presentation. As with my guide, there is so much information I’d love to share, so my current efforts are also focused around narrowing focus and condensing my presentation to have breadth while remaining captivating and digestible to the audience. I am continuing to practice and tweak my slides in preparation for my practice presentation on Monday, where I will additionally focus on engaging the audience through my presentation style. In watching previous senior project presentation recordings, I thought more about my stage presence and decided to focus on audience engagement and my “hook” to draw the crowd in. I will continue working on this in the coming days as I prepare for the real deal! I look forward to sharing all of my hard work next Thursday, and I am excited to speak about one of my greatest passions: music!
Week 12: Thank Yous and Concluding Remarks
Hello and welcome to my final blog post! Yesterday I had the honor of presenting my senior project at ShapeShifter Labs in Park Slope, and I want to thank everybody who attended and listened attentively. I felt my presentation was a success, and I hope I was able to make at least one person in the audience turn on their favorite album once they got home.
It was especially meaningful for me to speak about my personal connection to this topic, as well as my work with Life Story Club. I would like to thank the entire team there, as they continued to support me throughout this entire process. I cannot wait to share the recording with them! I would also like to thank my project advisor, Mr. Rappelfeld, for always answering my questions and being a resource every single day over these past three months, and my family for being there for me throughout this journey.
This project has taught me numerous skills and lessons, as this was my first venture into a true research project. I learned how to structure my own time and prioritize my tasks, a skill that I am sure will be very useful these next four years. In pursuing a project I have genuine interest in, I truly enjoyed every assignment, every paper I read, and every step along this path. And now I am beyond proud of the final product!
Speaking of, I officially finished my final deliverable! Here is my Music & Mind Guide, a shareable infographic aiming to inform larger populations of the benefits of music and music therapy in the brain. Please take a look, read through it, and share it to whoever would find it useful. My goal in making this guide is to inform others, so—if you would like to—you can help me do just that by passing it around!
This project has been such a meaningful experience for me in myriad ways, and I am thrilled to continue looking at the brain as I begin studying Neurobiology at Georgetown University in the fall. I hope I get the chance to look at music and the mind again, a topic that will always pique my interest and make me want to learn more. Thank you for keeping up with my blog posts, now go press play on some music!
If you were not able to attend the event, feel free to take a look at my slideshow here and the photos below!
