Candy Cohn used to always speak with her mother, Lillian Cohn, in English, with a few words here and there in Yiddish.
Then one day, Lillian, of Delray Beach, started singing a beautiful Yiddish love song called Sheyn Vi Di Levone.
"I'd never heard her sing it. I never heard her play it. The look on her face and the joy. I hadn't seen that in her in a long time," Candy Cohn recalled in an interview with WLRN in talking about her mother, who passed away in 2022.
The song’s title means beautiful as the moon. Cohn started regularly playing a video of actress and performer Lisa Fishman singing this song. She didn’t expect the music to tap into a memory bank her mom still had.
"It brought back so many memories for her," said Cohn, who owns Oasis Senior Advisors South Florida, which helps families find housing for older loved ones. "She started telling me how she first heard it, what she was doing, and when she would sing it."
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Medical experts have explored how music can activate memory for years. Neurologists explain that episodes of our lives first get filed away in an inner region of the brain called the hippocampus. Over time, memories get stored for the long term in the outer layer of the brain, which is the cerebral cortex.
“Even in a person with Alzheimer's whose hippocampus has been destroyed, those older memories are still able to survive in the cortex,” said Dr. Andrew Budson, who studies the science of memory. He works as the chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology at the Veterans Affairs Boston Health Care System and is a neurology professor at Boston University.
A song can get encoded in the brain, or consolidated, with an episode of one’s life, like a time and place. That’s called episodic memory. Learning the lyrics and the melody of a song becomes part of semantic memory, which is the general knowledge, like facts, that we accumulate over time.
“You get this sort of resilient memory that is well preserved in the cortex, that is still linked to an episode of someone's life. It's a semantic memory linked into an episodic memory, and so we can use the semantic memory, whether it's the music or the language, to pull the episodic memory out.”
What’s more, when we tap our feet, clap our hands, and nod our heads to a song, that activates the body’s motor system… and procedural memory.
The combination of episodic, semantic, and procedural memories can make memory more resilient.
“Maybe we could use [music] as a tool to help people remember better,” Budson said. “The main thing my lab is interested in is can we find tools and techniques and habits that people can use to help them remember things better, to allow them to live more independently in their own homes for a longer period of time.”
Music as therapy
Tino Negri has seen the results of music therapy for many people with dementia. He’s an owner of a company in South Florida called ComForCare, which provides respite for caregivers. He’s also done a lot of volunteer work at community centers across this region, bringing interactive music programs to residents with memory disorders.
“Music is the one thing that opens up people's brains, and it helps fire off neurons on both hemispheres of the brain,” he said — pointing to serotonin, which helps our mood, dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in learning and emotion, and endorphins, which reduce stress and pain. “These are chemicals that make people happy.”
Negri urges caregivers to play music at home, but not just any songs. Rather, those that are tailored to their loved ones. What they loved or moved them in their youth.
“Yiddish is known as 'mame loshn,' which means mother's tongue. It's a language that touches into culture, into religion, into one's history.”Dr Marc Agronin, geriatric psychiatrist.
Long-term memories are still accessible long into a disease like Alzheimer’s, and can be sources of comfort for people, said Dr. Marc Agronin, a geriatric psychiatrist and the chief medical officer for the MIND Institute of Miami Jewish Health.
“Yiddish is known as mame loshn, which means mother's tongue,” Agronin said. “It's a language that touches into culture, into religion, into one's history.”
Agronin said when music moves a person, it involves the entire brain.
He has been moved to see “someone who otherwise might be somewhat withdrawn and really experiencing significant short-term memory deficits, literally come alive when you play music that touches into them,” said Agronin, who recommends personalized programs like the Miami-based Mind & Melody.
Treatment has to be individualized because different music works for different people. “Someone who grew up with Yiddish music, this might be something that really inspires them, but I've worked with patients from all over the world, and I've been exposed to so many different types of music that they love,” Agronin said, like music from Cuba and India. “It's wonderful when you see someone really almost appear rejuvenated by the music.”
Remembering the past with song
Miriam Hoffman is a renowned Yiddish author, playwright and former journalist who taught the language for nearly three decades at Columbia University.
On a recent morning in her Coral Springs apartment, she sang an array of songs in Yiddish, reciting the precise lyrics without missing a single word from the lyrics.
She sang along with her son, Avi Hoffman, a famed actor. They sang songs like Oyfn Veg Shteyt A Boym, which means "on the road stands a tree," and Oyfn Pripetshik, meaning "in the fireplace."
The tunes date back decades and harken to memories of her childhood as a young Jewish girl growing up first in Russia, then Poland, Austria and Germany before moving to New York.
"I am always amazed at how readily my mother's memories are clearer when we speak or listen to her beloved Yiddish language and music."Avi Hoffman, whose mother is a diagnosed with a disease linked with dementia.
What's striking about her ability to recall these songs, says her son, Avi Hoffman, who is a famed actor, is that his mother was diagnosed nearly five years ago with white matter disease, which is linked to dementia. Sometimes she needs help recalling some details about her life — except when speaking in Yiddish.
“It comes so natural that I don’t even think to speak Yiddish. It just flows,” Miriam Hoffman told WLRN.
To remember events of the past in English, though, she sometimes needs a little help from her son.
He has made more than 200 videos on YouTube, in Yiddish and English, through a nonprofit dedicated to spreading the love for the language that the Hoffmans co-founded, called Yiddishkayt Initiative. Avi Hoffman says these are especially helpful for people who spoke the language in childhood and might be at home without fellow Yiddish speakers.
"I am always amazed at how readily my mother's memories are clearer when we speak or listen to her beloved Yiddish language and music," Avi Hoffman said.
Having witnessed that joy herself with her mother, Candy Cohn decided to sponsor a Yiddish concert in Delray Beach in February. Lisa Fishman, the singer in the video Cohn used to play for her mother, was in town from Los Angeles and came to perform at the Weisman Delray Community Center.
The concert had a waitlist of people wanting to get in. Cohn said she plans to sponsor more to bring more joy, especially for people who have dementia.
