Music memory provides access to verbal knowledge in a patient with global amnesia

Abstract

We report on the patient CH, who showed marked impairment of declarative memory in everyday life and standardized memory tests subsequent to herpes simplex encephalltis. However, there was anecdotal evidence for preserved learning capacity for verbal material (song titles) in connection with playing accordion music. Our experiments, tallored to CH's individual accordion repertoire, confirmed strong associations between language (song titles) and music (accordion melodies): CH performed 100% of the melodies correctly after being presented with the respective song titles. Presented with melodies, she recognized 90% of the titles out of several distractors. This good verbal memory success is conspicuous in the light of her otherwise severe memory impairments. To elucidate the phenomenon, we examined additionally the semantic knowledge concerning music-associated verbal material in CH by definition, categorization, reading and naming tasks. If music-associated words belonged to an actually better preserved or relearned vocabulary, we would have expected CH to perform better with music-associated concepts than with comparable, non-music-associated concepts. However, that was not the case. CH's good verbal memory in a musical context may be explained in terms of a material-specific, semantically empty priming effect.