Not only the lyrics and melodies of the songs they never seem to disappear from the memorybut sometimes they pop up forcefully in the “acoustic chamber” mentally without us realizing it. They often end up to pester us beyond our will, repeating in our heads even when we wish they would leave us alone. The secret of their persistence It is in the connection they create with the episodic memory and with the emotions. The rhythm and the melodyas well as the textconstitute elements of memory recovery redundant, that is, each of them immediately refers to the others, facilitating their I remember.
Music and the Brain: What Happens?
When we listen to a song, the first area of the cortex to activate is the auditory area, which is located right behind our ear. Every time we listen to a song, it is decomposed And mapped creating as a “sound footprint” easy to access for memory. It is thehippocampus to play a crucial role in the conservation and recovery of the long term memory of music. His secret is connect very solidly what we hear with the contexts and the emotions that we are living in the precise moment that in the period of life in which we listen to certain songs. It therefore connects our emotions with the notes of the melody with a solid mnemonic cord. This creates a sort of “tags” emotional which makes the memory of the song immediate.
A key aspect of musical memory is the repetition. The more we listen to a song, the more easily it connects with more moments in our life, and with more emotions, consolidating the memory of the lyrics and the melody. In fact, neural connections are strengthened every time we listen to the song again. This process is known as Long-Term Potentiationand consists in the creation of new connections between neurons by virtue of their frequent activation, which thus makes the memory of the song more stable And long-lasting. Listening to songs we like is a behavior that is reinforced by the release of dopaminewhich pushes us to listen and listen again, promoting the repetition.
The Effect of Emotions on Musical Memory
Let’s imagine listening to a song during thesummer of our first love. The strong ones emotions will make that period of life deep and well-wired in our emotional brain; some songs more than others, perhaps because of the significance of the lyrics or even just because, coincidentally, that song is playing on the radio during a specific period, will activate our romantic feelings. When a song is connected to strong emotions, the brain releases neurotransmitters such as dopaminewhich have an immediate effect of physiological well-being. Neural connections thus consolidate, as if we were digging a path ever deeper into our mind. This is why certain songs seem to evoke immediately vivid memories of past moments of our life. It is no coincidence that listening to music is accompanied by an increase in blood flow in areas of the limbic brainthe one that processes emotions.
The song becomes a strong mnemonic clueand his first notes are enough to reactivate the limbic areas of the brain that arouse in us the emotions of past moments. The strength, compared to a poem or a paragraph of a book, lies in the relationship between words, rhythm and melody. It’s like having not one, but three “mnemonic hooks” that capture with a tight lasso the memory hidden in our head. The combination of words, rhythm and melody creates a triple memory track: that verbal (the words), that storm (the rhythm) and that musical (the melody). This triple binary makes the songs particularly resistant to oblivion. The regularity of the patterns present in a song (think of the refrain which is repeated, not by chance the part generally most easily remembered) facilitates coding for our brain, an organ always looking for regularities to discover.
Think about how many times we have remembered an entire song just by listening to the chorus. This happens because the repetitive structure of the chorus works as an anchor in our mind. The power of music is so strong that, in an experiment by Särkämö and colleagues in 2008, it turns out that stroke patients have notable benefits in terms of verbal memory recovery if, during their rehabilitation period, they are made to listen to their favorite songs. In addition to memory, attention span and mood also improved.
