YOUR 2025 BRAIN BRAWN • MICRO RESOLUTIONS IMMERSING YOURSELF IN ART & MUSIC

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Good morning and welcome to August! We are taking a slightly different approach to our monthly mini resolutions this August with four different brain brawn micro resolutions for the month—a new one in each week—instead of one overarching resolution:
 
Week 1: Music and Art Therapy
Week 2: Social Engagement
Week 3: Lifelong Learning
Week 4: Hearing Loss


Track Your Progress!
 
Track your micro resolution and continue on with all our past mini resolutions, too. Use our new log to to track your progress!
 
Questions? Email your Motivated Mondays Coach Michele at [email protected].
 
If you are new to Motivated Mondays, you can review the 2025 content here.




A Music & Art Therapy Brain Brawn

We’re kicking off the month with music and art therapy—two non-pharmaceutical interventions with a long history of positively influencing certain symptoms in neurodegenerative conditions.

Music and art therapy have been shown to improve behavioral symptoms, like agitation, and psychological symptoms, depression and anxiety, in addition to enhancing memory and encouraging socialization.
 
 
You can see these benefits by being an observer or by holding a paintbrush or musical instrument!


We’re kicking off the month with music and art therapy—two non-pharmaceutical interventions with a long history of positively influencing certain symptoms in neurodegenerative conditions.
 
Music and art therapy have been shown to improve behavioral symptoms, like agitation, and psychological symptoms, depression and anxiety, in addition to enhancing memory and encouraging socialization. You can see the benefits by being an observer or by holding a paintbrush or musical instrument!
 
Fascinatingly, music and art have been described as the scaffolding between the deteriorating areas of the brain and the preserved areas! A 2023 meta-analysis of studies involving music and neurodegeneration found that 93% of the 107 studies analyzed demonstrated at least one benefit of music on neurodegenerative conditions.
 
While the exact molecular mechanism between music, art and neurodegeneration isn’t completely understood, we do know this:

Music Therapy Mechanism of Action
 
Musical training can induce brain plasticity. Specifically, music acts as a stimulus, causing adaptive structural and functional changes in the brain. This can be as extensive as aiding in stroke recovery or as simple as learning something new. This concept was tapped into by the Saturday Morning cartoon, Schoolhouse Rock.
 
Listening to or playing music can stimulate the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, which helps regulate learning, memory processing and cognitive function.
 
Music can stimulate autobiographical memory. Indeed, this connection is often resistant to decline.
Known Brain Benefits of Art Therapy
 
Art (in particular, via collage making) can enhance memory recall.
 
Art can also reinforce sustained attention and intellectual engagement.
 
Art can encourage bottom-up and top-down cognitive processing—two different theories about how the brain processes information delivered via the senses. Top-down processing is when the brain takes in the information as a whole and breaks it down to the smallest, minor aspects. Bottom-up processing refers to the idea that individual elements are taken in, one by one, and pieced together to create the entire structure as it is seen.

Remarkably, music can even epigenetically influence genes! This is known as “sensogenomics,” meaning music can turn on certain genes. In this context, these genes may protect memory and cognition.

So what does this mean for those of us wishing to ward off neurodegenerative conditions?

It means that enjoying the arts, either as a participant or an observer, may be beneficial for the structure and processing of the cognitive function of the brain. It also means we can potentially create a reservoir of memories accessible to us via the arts.
 
This week, let’s resolve to try one of the following:

ART

TRIAL IT:

• Think you might like to make something for future use? Check out this long list of interesting ideas.
• Feel like a kid again with an adult coloring book.
• Learn something new while coloring with one of these anatomy coloring books.

COMMIT TO IT:

• Attend an adult education class in art history. Free options are available online, via local junior colleges and even some local libraries. Then, take what you learn to explore a museum.
• Attend an art class—drawing, painting or crafting.
• Contact a certified art therapist for more ideas.

MUSIC

TRIAL IT:

• Musical games such as music trivia and bingo challenge our memories of lyrics.
• Attend a sound bath session.
• Explore the scales—xylophone not required.

COMMIT TO IT:

• If you always wanted to learn to play a musical instrument, what’s stopping you now? Years ago, this may have necessitated expensive private lessons but, today, with video and online courses, this becomes available to pretty much anyone!

• Find a certified music therapist for more ideas.

How do we connect music and art to our memories?
 
Make a collage. It may have been decades since you last cut up old magazines to create a vision board or tell a story about your life, but now is the perfect time to revisit that creative tradition. Gather glue, glitter, magazines, and photos, and craft collages themed around a special person, a group of people, or a meaningful chapter in your life.
 
You might also try making a memory jar—and decorate the outside with your collage, then fill the inside with trinkets or keepsakes that remind you of the person or time you’re honoring. Better yet, invite the people connected to those memories to join you. Share stories, laugh, cry, and enjoy each other’s company as you deepen your collective memory bank.
 
Another idea: create playlists tied to a particular person or period in your life. You can journal your reflections as you listen or play the music while working on your collage or jar for extra inspiration.
 
Side note: If you’re a caregiver for someone with a neurodegenerative condition, consider exploring Meet Me at MoMA, a program offered by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While it’s designed for local New Yorkers, MoMA also provides written materials so other museums can replicate the program in their own communities.

We hope you’re feeling inspired! We’ll see you next week for our next microresolution!