Having done hands on research in motor behavior and learning during co-op and being able to watch real time improvement of motor behavior activities by mice, I was interested in staying in the realm of motor behavior and learning. This led me to reading about memory and learning. Seeing as it is a topic we have talked about in class, I started to think about how it is always on our mind given the changes in the ability of people and other mammals to remember increasingly large volumes of information during the course of development and then lose that ability over a lifetime. Learning and memory dysfunctions are a huge part of neuroscience research given disorders such as Dementia, Alzheimer’s and Cognitive Impairment. Therefore, I decided to delve into learning and memory during the times before major dysfunction is evident.
Initially I wanted to study learning and memory as a whole and the neural mechanisms underlying it, however this proved to be a very broad topic and one that encompassed many different kinds of research from cognitive development and genetics to the role of neurotransmitters such as dopamine in memory formation and consolidation. There are also different aspects of memory available to focus on such as long term and short term memory, consolidation, learning vs retrieval and other hypotheses of how mammals encode engrams.
Here is where I decided to narrow the scope. I have chosen to look at memory aids, in particular; music. Music has been mentioned a lot in pop psychology and the media as an aid in many mental processes, however there is a lack of substantial neurobiology evidence to support any claims made online. Thus, my paper will aim to cover peer- reviewed articles and journals that study the effect of music on memory in rodent models. I believe this will be an interesting topic and provide insight to the changes and adaptations in neuronal morphology as well as behavior in response to not only music, but different types of music. I want to understand the basis of how music affects the brain and to what extent it can help with mental processes, most importantly, memory.
The first paper by Tonegawa et al. 2003, looks at general memory acquisition, consolidation and retrieval and talk about the underlying neural mechanisms in the hippocampus using temporal and spatial restriction transgenic mouse lines. The second paper by Gallistel and Matzel 2012, talks about Hebbian learning and associative learning theory comparing properties of associative learning and memory to the properties of long term potentiation. This study offers more of a cognitive map of memory and provides review of reinforcement learning as well as offers a method to identify information processing domains for learning. Using these as a background and starting point, I then will move on to papers such as Kuhlmann et al. 2018 that offers a systematic review of experimental research depicting how music affects rodents. This will provide an overview of the existing research in the field of music research on rodent models. Meng et al. 2004 experimented with spatial learning tasks and classical music to observe behavioral changes and improvement in spatial memory. Using a microarray, they observed gene expression profiles of the hippocampus and cortex between mice exposed to classical music and naive mice. This paper ties in experiments we have discussed in class and directly presents evidence for the hypothesis that music can affect memory. Another paper by Amagdei et al. 2009, observe the effects of music on development of young mice that have lesions to study the prospect of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. There are a few more papers I have linked that, without going into too much detail, provide a similar hypothesis to the aforementioned papers and some others look at hormonal effects on working memory based on changes in music as well as papers that observe the effects of different types of music on memory. I aim to look at the difference in hormonal, genetic and plasticity components of how music affects memory in rodent models, as it seems music has a multifaceted effect.
Links to papers:
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