Have you ever heard a song that reminds you of a specific person, place, or memory? I know I have certain songs that remind me of a specific memory, some good and some bad. For example, whenever I hear the song “Ain’t No Other Man” by Christina Aguilera it reminds me of singing at the top of my lungs, with my best friend, in my room when we were about 12 years old. This is only one of many examples for me personally. I have so many songs that remind me of thing, and some remind me of a bad memory so vividly that I can’t even listen to them. I really am curious as to why the linking is so strong between the song and the memory.

photo is from http://blog.musicteachershelper.com/making-memories-for-a-positive/

I began to look into why this happens, and i found this study. It shows that music seems to be able to help people remember things.  The website from which that study is found says, “The findings suggest that music is an effective stimulus for eliciting autobiographical memories and may be beneficial in the rehabilitation of autobiographical amnesia, but only in patients without a fundamental deficit in autobiographical recall memory and intact pitch perception”. This is really interesting, but after I saw this I was even more curious on why exactly this happens.

This site explained in perfect words what seems to happen to me when I hear certain song. It says, “’What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head. It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye,’ Janata said. ‘Now we can see the association between those two things—the music and the memories.’” Janata, who is quoted above, is an associate professor of psychology at UC Davis’ Center for Mind and Brain. Another study that was done in 2011 came up with results that indicate that the “large-scale neural networks” are engaged when listening to music, not just the auditory parts of our brains.

According to this site, which talks about, and explains, the results of the 2011 study. The site sums it up like this, “The Finnish researchers correlated temporal evolutions of timbral, tonal, and rhythmic features of musical stimulus. While timbral feature processing was associated with activations in cognitive areas of the cerebellum, and sensory and the default mode network gray matter of the cerebral hemispheres, musical pulse and tonality processing recruited cortical and subcortical cognitive, motor and emotion-related circuits.” To put it more simply: Listening to, and processing, music uses parts of our brains that are connected to emotion and creativity, which may be why we remember and connect certain songs to specific memories.

There are studies, such as the first one I linked, that show how music can help people who have troubles remembering things to remember a specific memory. It is amazing the way our brains works, and how parts of it connect to other parts. Here is a video that shows how music helps people with Alzheimer’s disease remember things.

In the video it talks about how memories can be stored differently, and how we process music. It talks about the temporal lobe and frontal lobe interacting when we hear the rhythm, then other parts of the our brain gets more involved as we connect farther with the song as we begin to sing along or move along with the song. I think its remarkable, like the doctor in the video says in the video, a man who cannot remember his own daughter can remember a specific memory when a song is playing. I think it would be awesome to see more research being done so that we can try to make advances, and use music to farther help patients with memory loss.