Kelly Jakubowski
The Conversation
Imagine you are walking in a crowded place on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven't heard in years. Suddenly, instead of paying attention to what's going on around you, your mind brings you back to the first time you heard that song.
Listening to music can bring us to remember past experiences, who we were with in the past, and the feelings associated with those memories.
The experiences we have when music evokes memories of events, people, and other things from our past are known as music -evoked autobiographical memory. This is a common human experience.
It usually appears as an accidental memory. That is, we are not trying to try to remember the memory, but the memory that just appears spontaneously.
Recently, researchers have begun to unravel why music is such a great cue for recalling memories. First, music often accompanies many events throughout human life, such as farewells, graduations, weddings and funerals. This means that music can play an important role in reconnecting us with the moments that shape us.
Music also often attracts our attention, because it can affect our minds, bodies , and emotions.
When this happens, it is very likely that the music will be stored in memory along with the details of a life event that was taking place at that time. This means that music can also be a trigger for recalling the event years later.
Positive memories
In our recent research, my colleagues and I found that the emotional nature of a piece of music is an important factor shaping its function as a memory cue.
We compared music to other emotional memory cues that, according to many of our research participants, are capable of depicting the same emotional expressions as the music quotes we used. This includes “emotional sounds” such as nature and factory sounds, as well as “emotional words”, such as “money” and “tornados”.
When compared to the categories of triggers above, we found that music did not evoke memories any better than emotional words.
However, we also found that music evokes more consistent positive memories than other emotional sounds and words. This is especially true for negative emotional stimuli. Specifically, for example, sad and angry music can evoke more positive memories than sad and angry sounds or words.
Thus, it seems that music has the ability to reconnect our minds with positive emotional moments from our past. This shows that using music as therapy can be very beneficial.
How and when
Not surprisingly, how well we know a piece of music certainly also has an effect. In another of our new studies, we found that music that is more familiar to a person's ears evokes more memories, as well as bringing memories into our minds more spontaneously.
So, one of the reasons why music can be a more effective cue for memory awakening than, say, our favorite movie or book, is that we usually listen to songs more often than we watch movies, TV shows, or read books.
The situation when we listen to music also has an effect. Various studies have shown that spontaneous memories are more likely to reappear during activities that allow our minds to "wander" into the past. These activities usually include activities that don't demand our attention, such as being quiet on the train to work, doing homework, and relaxing.
This type of activity closely aligns with what we have encountered in our other studies. In that research, we asked participants to write diaries and record moments when music jogged their memories and what activities they were doing at the time they occurred.
We found that everyday activities that are often done while listening to music – such as traveling, doing chores, or taking a slow jog for exercise – are more likely to spontaneously recall past memories.
This is in contrast to when we do other hobbies, such as watching TV , which can actually make our minds more focused on the activity we are doing so it is less likely for us to remember the past.
Music apparently isn't just good for jogging memories. Moments when we are more inclined to listen to music are moments when our minds are more likely to naturally run all over the place
Music is also often present in many life events that are unique, full of emotion, or shape us. As a result, these types of memories tend to be easier for us to remember.
Indeed, the power of music to connect us to the past shows how music, memory and emotions are connected. Some songs seem to be a "bridge" to return to youth.
Kelly Jakubowski is Assistant Professor in Music Psychology, Durham University.
The article was originally published in The Conversation.
