DVD: Alive Inside

Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory

by Michael Rossato-Bennett, Director/Producer 

Pottstown, Pennsylvania, MVD Visual   2014 imprint   78 minutes

This DVD is a documentary about how to materially improve the lives of Alzheimer's sufferers and those with other forms of dementia by using an iPod, headphones, and personalized music from their past.


Whether of a pop rock, opera, musicals, or jazz genre, songs of personal meaning from your past can connect you with a forgotten sense of identity via a back door to the memory, which is often ravaged by neurological disorders such as dementia and Parkinsons.  Musical memory, the part of the brain that responds to music, seems not to be affected by dementia or Alzheimers.  With proof shown repeatedly in this film, we see how the power of 'their' music can bring a person into the present and 'wake up' from a withdrawn stupor, and even begin dancing in their chair.

The man behind the impetus to bring this music therapy to nursing homes is Dan Cohen.  He asks the question, "Isn't this desire to awaken another person to what they are, to what they could be, a deep part of being human?"  The elders with dementia respond with comments like:  'I feel like I'm one with the world . . . at peace with the world' (i.e., not struggling with personal identity or self);  'The music gives me the feeling of love'; 'The Lord came to me . . . made me a holy man . . . gave me sounds.'

-- reviewed by Mona Bronson