In an undergraduate Psychology class, I read a little book by Victor Frankl entitled, Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s one of those books that had an impact on me at the time, and an even greater impact on my work as a clinical psychologist.  The author was an Austrian psychiatrist who spent several years in Nazi concentration camps during WWII.  Frankl found that the people who survived the camps best were those who believed that they had a reason or purpose that required that they survive.  Those who felt a sense of mission or worthwhile purpose for their suffering were far less debilitated by it. As I was a budding scientist in the field of human behavior, Frankl’s writing made a difference in how I looked at life’s priorities, both my own and those of my patients.

Recent medical research has validated Frankl’s observations and has expanded on the breadth of the role that life purpose plays in our health and wellbeing.  Researchers have found that a strong sense of purpose in life correlates with better physical and emotional health, including happiness and enhanced productivity.  And more recently, studies have found that having a sense of purpose in life, and a sense that what you do matters may protect your brain from the clinical effects of dementia.

One of the consultants on our upcoming research project, my colleague, Patricia A. Boyle, Ph.D., has done some groundbreaking research on the role of purpose in life in protecting our brains from cognitive decline.  Dr. Boyle is a psychologist at the Rush Alzheimer’s Center and is part of the team of researchers involved in the Memory and Aging Project and the Religious Orders Project, longitudinal studies involving thousands of participants.  These projects began in the 1990’s, with people who, at the time, had no demonstrable cognitive challenges.  The participants are evaluated once a year, for physical, social, psychological, and cognitive health.  The battery of tests includes a 10-point questionnaire that assesses purpose in life.

I’m fascinated by Dr. Boyle’s work; it suggests that purpose in life has more far-reaching positive effects than I ever imagined. Read on if you’d like to know more about her research, or if you’d like to watch a video summary of her work, here’s a link to a presentation she gave to a group of care facility administrators (it’s 13 minutes long and well worth your time):

https://www.nic.org/resource-library/patricia-boyle/

Like other researchers, her team had seen the relationship between a strong sense of life purpose and health measures such as physical health, greater longevity, decreased chance of cardiovascular disease, greater happiness, and well-being.  They also saw a link between strong purpose in life and a lower risk of cognitive impairment.

What I find intriguing about Dr. Boyle’s research is what they found when they looked at the neurobiology of their subjects.  When study participants died, their brains were autopsied to look at the relationship between the physical condition of their brains and the results of the years of cognitive, physical, and psychological assessments.

Some brief background in neurobiology:

Two of the biggest markers of Alzheimer’s disease are an accumulation of plaque and the existence of “tangles” in the information pathways of the brain.  When the Rush team looked at the brains of their subjects, they saw no difference in the levels of plaque or tangles in people who rated highly on purpose in life, versus those who did not.  In other words, a strong sense of purpose in life does not appear to prevent the accumulation of those harmful plaques and tangles.

But here’s the good news!  When Dr. Boyle and her colleagues looked at participants whose autopsied brains had identical levels of plaques and tangles, and then correlated that with how those people had rated in both cognitive functioning and strong sense of purpose in life, the people who rated highly on purpose in life had a 30 percent lower rate of cognitive decline than those with low scores on the purpose in life inventory.  The researchers controlled for overall physical health, exercise, education levels, IQ, personality traits and other psychological issues such as depression and anxiety – and ruled those out as factors that could explain the markedly lower rate of cognitive decline.

It’s not certain why that happens, but researchers believe that a strong sense of purpose in life plays a role in strengthening “neural reserve” in the brain.  “Reserve” protects the brain from the negative effects and bodily deterioration that occurs as a normal process of aging.  As the Rush studies show, having a strong sense of purpose in life, particularly at age 80 and beyond, protects the brain from the effects of the damage and allows the individual to function at a higher level, cognitively.

At Sounds Good and Good Memories, we’re excited about this research, in particular the question that it raises;

What kinds of activities can increase one’s sense of purpose in life?

What if singing in a choir does?

Our research partnership with Northwestern and Rush hopes to find an answer to that question when we begin our fall pilot study, which endeavors to document the positive effects of choral singing for older adults, including those with dementia.