My name is Eva, and I am going to be working with Winthrop Senior Living to complete more research regarding how music affects dementia patients. The brain is an interesting and complex organ, and even with all of the modern medical advances there are still many things we don’t understand about it.
I first came up with this idea when we were visiting my grandma on my dad’s side, who suffered from dementia. Although she would forget who we were at times, she would ALWAYS remember her favorite Elvis song. She didn’t have much mobility but she never let that stop her from moving her hands and feet and singing along! Music is one of the only things that we can always count on to cheer her up. This made me start to wonder exactly how brains with Alzheimers and Dementia work.
While this is a research project, I also plan on using this as an opportunity to give back to the community! I hope to add Winthrop Senior Living to the service bus so that multiple people can help with this cause. We will be helping them with fine motor skills by doing activities like folding towels or cutting paper to give them more independence and a sense of purpose. But, we will also be doing things like coloring, painting, playing board/card games, and of course, singing and dancing to music!
Senior Ventures is a year-long academic program built on a framework of leadership, innovation and community engagement. Through a proven self-guided exploratory process, seniors whose proposals are selected for this program work independently to develop a project that’s interdisciplinary in scope and is connective, performance-based, investigative, or entrepreneurial. Click here to learn more.
