Rebuilding identity after brain injury: Standard cognitive and music-evoked autobiographical memory training

Abstract

Background: This paper presents a report involving a male patient who had experienced a subarachnoid haemorrhage. He presented with profound anterograde and retrograde amnesia, which caused him to be severely confused about his social contacts and his environment. Aim: To describe the complexity of amnesia and identity loss and examine how the combination of cognitive and music-evoked autobiographical training affected a person with anterograde and retrograde amnesia following subarachnoid haemorrhages (acquired brain injury [ABI]). Method: The 47-year-old male patient, who had worked as a DJ for some parts of his life previously had a good memory of musical events and facts about musical artists. This patient received an applied cognitive training programme (part I), which was based on spaced retrieval and errorless learning methods. The patient also received therapy involving the administration of music-evoked emotional responses (part II). The cognitive training programme consisted of 13 hourly sessions spread over four weeks. The music-based intervention included 5 hourly sessions, which took part place over two weeks. Results: Part I optimised the patient's name recall and local orientation. The resulting recovery of day-to-day memory and the awareness of the dependence on learning strategies led to the patient having a realisation of his severe loss of autobiographical memory. The patient became frustrated, angry and depressed and was at risk of disengaging from most areas of his neuro-rehabilitation programme. Part II enabled the patient to link the music or the artist with autobiographical events and to elicit emotional responses to such events. These were stringed into an autobiographical narrative with the result that the patient gained insight into the person he used to be and connected with past emotional experiences. The regained autobiographical memories were maintained beyond the training context. Conclusion: The patient's mood and motivation to continue his neuro-rehabilitation programme improved. This enabled him to make further progress regarding his functional independence.

A review of music-evoked visual mental imagery: Conceptual issues, relation to emotion, and functional outcome.

“…Several of these mechanisms have received much attention by music psychologists and thus warranted further theoretical discussion and empirical testing. Examples include episodic memory , where emotion induction is caused by music evoking the memory of a particular event in the listener’s life, or musical expectancy , where emotion induction is caused by a specific feature of the music that violates, delays, or confirms the listener’s expectations about the music’s unfolding (Cuddy, Sikka, Silveira, Bai, & Vanstone, 2017; Gurr, Foxhall, Shinoda, & Baird, 2014; Huron, 2006; Janata, 2009; Janata, Tomic, & Rakowski, 2007; Lehne, Rohrmeier, & Koelsch, 2014; Meyer, 1956). However, other mechanisms including visual imagery have been largely neglected by music psychology research despite their crucial role in music-evoked emotions (Day & Thompson, 2019; Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2015).…”

What elicits music-evoked nostalgia? An exploratory study among college students

“…Nostalgia also serves as a resource for the self. This is because nostalgia is linked to autobiographical memories of oneself, usually consisting of positive associations (Gurr et al, 2014; Janata et al, 2007). These self-identifying memories range in importance and emotional strength (Cady et al, 2008).…”

“…These include song familiarity (Ford et al, 2011; Janata et al, 2007; North et al, 2004), song enjoyment (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013), the person’s level of autobiographical association with the song (Janata et al, 2007; Wildschut et al, 2006), and level of emotional arousal the songs brings (Cady et al, 2008; Holland & Kensinger, 2010; Omar et al, 2011; Schulkind et al, 1999). Although there is a large amount of literature published on the relationship between music and autobiographical memories (Blais-Rochette & Miranda, 2016; Cady et al, 2008; Ford et al, 2011; Gurr et al, 2014; Jakubowski & Ghosh, 2021; Janata et al, 2007), there are few publications on the interplay between music and memory in relation to specifically evoking the emotion of nostalgia (Barrett et al, 2010; Michels-Ratliff & Ennis, 2016). Furthermore, studies have not explored what component best predicts music-evoked nostalgia, which could be insightful for therapeutic purposes.…”