Emotional power of music in patients with memory disorders: clinical implications of cognitive neuroscience.

By adapting methods of cognitive psychology to neuropsychology, we examined memory and familiarity abilities in music in relation to emotion. First we present data illustrating how the emotional content of stimuli influences memory for music. Second, we discuss recent findings obtained in patients with two different brain disorders (medically intractable epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease) that show relatively spared memory performance for music, despite severe verbal memory disorders. Studies on musical memory and its relation to emotion open up paths for new strategies in cognitive rehabilitation and reinstate the importance of examining interactions between cognitive and clinical neurosciences.