It is no coincidence that people remember certain events in their lives because of music.
Yiren Ren, a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and others published a new study that revealed how listening to music can not only trigger memories, but also change the way people remember them.
Ren’s mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie also participated in the study, which analyzed the connections between music, emotion and memory.
They developed a 3-day episodic memory task with separate encoding, recall, and retrieval phases to arrive at their primary hypothesis.
On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories.
The next day, they recalled the stories while listening to either positive music, negative music, or silence.
On the third and final day, they were asked to recall the stories again, this time without listening to music.
The participants’ brain activity was recorded on the second day with fMRI scans, which detect changes in brain blood flow.
From the results of the study, participants who listened to emotional music while recalling neutral stories were more likely to add emotional elements to the story.
Another finding was that there was increased activity in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, and the hippocampus, which plays a vital role in learning and memory, for participants who recalled stories while listening to music.
Plus, fMRI scans showed “altered neural engagement” during story recall with music, compared to story recall in silence.
According to the study, there was also evidence of communication between the parts of the brain that process emotional memory and the visual sensory processing parts of the brain.
In other words, music has the ability to infuse emotional details into memories that weren’t necessarily present when the event occurred.
Ren noted that “while further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and medicine.”
The study also explained how music can affect the memories of people dealing with depression, PTSD or other mental health conditions.
For those individuals, their negative memories can be made more positive and reduced over time by “carefully chosen music.”
The study noted that, based on these findings, music-based methods could be used in treatments for mental health conditions.
Overall, the study found a clear connection—and a positive one, at that—between music and memory.
“These findings illuminate the interplay between music, emotion, and memory, providing insight into the consequences of introducing emotional music to memory recall processes,” the study concludes.
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