The story of “ME” (pronounced “Emmy”), this 101-year-old musician with vascular dementia, is the fruit of six years of observations by Eleanor Selfridge-Field, a researcher in music and symbolism at Stanford University. It highlights once again the complexity of the human brain and its mysteries.
It was during the International Conference on Musical Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), on July 9, in San Francisco (California), that the researcher returned to this person who has already intrigued her for several years. .
Eleanor Selfridge-Field says she met “ME” over Christmas eight years ago. She was remarkably surprised by the virtuosity of this woman despite an illness causing her many memory problems on a daily basis.
After a stroke some twenty years ago, he was diagnosed with vascular dementia causing a major deterioration in his intellectual abilities.
Thus, the centenarian, beyond a particularly selective memory, does not always know where she is, nor does she remember events or meetings that have taken place over the past 20 years.
A passion hard to forget
As a child, “ME” learned the piano and the violin, then the trombone. She saw herself as an orchestra teacher and thus obtained two degrees in music education.
In 1946, the economic context not allowing her to teach music decently, she moved with her husband and children to Florida, she then decided to put aside her passion.
However, today, it is a repertoire of more than 400 songs that “ME” knows how to play by ear. The centenarian even composed an original work that she manages to replay easily. This leaves Eleanor Selfridge-Field thinking, who would like to better understand what is going on in her head for such a cognitive disparity to exist.
A useful language for memory
Zachary Miller, neurologist at the University of California, and interviewed by the New Scientist, recalls how difficult it is to assess the particularity of the brain of “ME”. In addition to the limited information available on this case study, such a procedure could be dangerous for a woman of her age.
Numerous studies carried out in recent years show that working on language areas in the brain, such as being bilingual, could delay dementia by several years.
This could explain the very special condition of this piano virtuoso who, according to Eleanor Selfridge-Field, displays a “really impressive” richness in her harmonic arrangements.
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