As soon as the music starts, Rose Cipa gets up to dance.
"Bring me sunshine, in your smile." She does a few skips and a pirouette. "Bring me laughter, all the while." Rose's carer, Elaine Richmond, gets up and joins in too and they loop round the room together. "In this world where we live, there should be more happiness." Now Rose has put her hand out and is dragging me up too. "Bring me sunshine, bring me love." We're all dancing now.
This impromptu dancing session is happening at Torrance Lodge care home in Hurlford, Ayrshire, where I've come to see the effect music can have on people who have memory problems due to dementia. For two years now, Rose, who is 91 and lives at Torrance Lodge, has been attending a group called Musical Minds, a singing group for people with dementia. What's different about the group is that it isn't just about sparking old memories by playing a diet of Vera Lynn and Frank Sinatra, it's about making new memories.
Rose is a good example of how it works. Since going to Musical Minds, she has learned some of the lyrics to Those Were the Days. She has also met and remembered the names of other members of the group. What it shows is that dementia doesn't have to be a full-stop to memories and that patients can learn new things.
For the founder of Musical Minds, Katy Hawker of Alzheimer Scotland, this is one of the key points of the group. "I think we're breaking boundaries with what we're doing," she says. "There's lots of evidence that music is good for reminiscence, self-esteem, communication and peer support. Where we're trying to break a little bit of a boundary is the fact we perform – we are proving people with Alzheimer's can learn new things. There are new memories being made."
Alzheimer Scotland is now doing research into what makes Musical Minds work with the hope of spreading the idea to other places. Certainly, the positive effects are obvious when you sit down and talk to Rose. "I went to Musical Minds for the first time years ago," she says. "But I've always loved music and dancing. Everybody loves music, it would be a poor person that didn't."
And then there are the old memories that the music inspires – glimpses and flashes of Rose's childhood. She sings a snatch of Al Jolson – "I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles, my mammy" – and remembers the big bands at the Grand Hall in Kilmarnock, where she grew up. "Everywhere I went, I was singing and dancing," she says. "Since before I was at the school. I used to dance my way to the school. I danced everywhere I went."
And now here she is, still singing and dancing 80 years later. "We're not concentrating on the brain," says Katy as our little music session comes to an end. "We're concentrating on the mind and the soul. If you make the person feel good as a whole and as part of a group, that is the therapy."
For more information, see www.alzscot.org
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