Sing Me A Memory

You can often recognize it on the very first beat. The melody starts to consume you, as you feel a rush from head to toe…and all of the sudden you begin to sing, uncontrollably, whether in the shower, the car, or sometimes even in public! There is no better feeling when you catch a familiar tune that was a classic "back in the day", or even a song that used to be your favorite, especially if it has been a while since you’ve heard it. I’m the first to admit that I would sometimes take the long way to drive home if a song came on the car radio that I wanted to listen to in its entirety, and I’ve never been embarrassed by my shower voice.

I’ve always found it fascinating how songs have the ability to change our moods, and so I was intrigued when I heard that songs have been found to possess memory-evoking capabilities. Throughout our lives, many songs tend to be affiliated with a period of particularly strong emotion, from couples recollecting a song playing when they first met, to a student remembering a song from his senior year in high school. It is no surprise that music is strongly tied to memory, since memories are more easily recalled during periods of intense emotional experience. "What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our heads," said Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis.

Jamata recognized that the medial pre-frontal cortex actually tracks chord and key changes in music, an area of the brain that is also activated in response to self-reflection and autobiographical recall. So, when an autobiographically related song was played to subjects in Jamata’s study, it is no surprise that this brain region was activated.

Even more interesting is the potential for music in areas such as Alzheimer’s research. These are individuals who suffer significant amounts of memory loss, but are still able to recognize songs from their pasts. "What's striking is that the prefrontal cortex is among the last [brain regions] to atrophy," Janata noted. Even if these patients cannot recall the memory that the song was affiliated with, the emotion associated with that experience is still evoked, evidenced by Alzheimer’s patients often singing along and reporting feelings of happiness when listening songs familiar to them. This just goes to show that when all else has left our minds, music will still be with us. Perhaps one day, this may lead to a method of retrieval of those memories we once thought permanently inaccessible, or lost forever, by the degenerative disease.

Also refer to the book by world-famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia