It’s no accident that people remember certain events in their lives because of music.
Yiren Ren, a psychology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, and others published a new study that discovered how listening to music can not only trigger memories but can also change how 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, recollection, and retrieval phases to get to 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 the brain’s blood flow.
From the study’s results, 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 an increase in activity in the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, and hippocampus, which plays a vital role in learning and memory, for participants who recalled stories while listening to music.
Plus, the fMRI scans showed “altered neural engagement” during story recollection with music, as opposed to story recollection in silence.
There was also evidence of communication between the emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the visual sensory processing parts of the brain, according to the study.
In other words, music has the ability to infuse emotional details into memories that were not necessarily present when the event occurred.
Ren noted that “while further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for 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 turned more positive and be reduced over time by “carefully chosen music.”
The study pointed out that, based on these findings, music-based methods can 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, offering insights into the consequences of infusing emotional music into memory recollection processes,” the conclusion of the study read.
