Music and Memory: 5 Awesome New Psychology Studies
Music aids language learning, helps injured brains remember,
causes widespread brain activation and more…
Music has tremendous power over memory.
Hearing an old song can take you back decades in the blink
of an eye.
Psychologists have been fascinated by this connection
between music and memory.
Here are five recent psychology studies which demonstrate
the intimate link between music and memory.
1.
Singing aids language learning
The link between music and memory is so strong that it can
help you learn a foreign language.
Research by Ludke et al. (2013) found that people trying to
learn Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language, performed much better if
they sang the Hungarian phrases rather than just saying them.
The researchers think that the melody may provide an extra
cue which helps embed the memory.
2.
Music helps injured brain remember
People who have suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBIs),
such as in a car accident, often have problems with memory.
Music is increasingly being tested as a way to help bring back
forgotten autobiographical memories.
A recent study had participants who had suffered severe TBIs
listening to number-one songs from their lifetimes to see what memories were
evoked (Baird & Sampson, 2013).
The memories brought back were mostly of people or a period
of their lives and were broadly similar to those evoked by control participants
who did not have a TBI.
Compared with using a standardised interview–the
Autobiographical Memory Interview–playing number-one hits to people who’d
suffered TBIs was more effective in eliciting memories.
3.
Widespread brain activation
One of the reasons music may be so powerful is that it
activates such large areas of the brain.
A recent brain imaging study found that music activated the
auditory, motor and limbic (emotional) regions (Alluri et al., 2013).
The study found that whether their participants were
listening to the Beatles or Vivaldi, largely the same areas of the brain were
active.
The motor areas process the rhythm, the auditory areas
process the sound, while the limbic regions are associated with the emotions
(Alluri et al., 2013).
4.
Music can take you back two generations
Classic hits can easily take you back to your teens and
twenties.
Most people have particularly strong memories of this time
in their lives–psychologists have called it the ‘reminiscence bump’.
But, perhaps surprisingly, one study has shown that people
also have mini reminiscence bumps for the music their parents listened to, and
even for their grandparents’ music (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013).
The
study’s lead author, Carol Lynne Krumhansl, explained:
“Music transmitted from generation to generation shapes
autobiographical memories, preferences, and emotional responses, a phenomenon
we call cascading ‘reminiscence bumps’.
“These new findings point to the impact of music in
childhood and likely reflect the prevalence of music in the home environment.”
Another study has shown that we don’t even need to hear the
tune for the memories to come flooding back–the words are enough (Cady et al.,
2008).
For a whole generation, the words “Ice, ice baby”, and for
another generation “…living in the gangsta’s paradise” are enough to take them
back in time.
5. A
unique musical hallucination
The power of music on people’s memory is sometimes
frightening.
A recent study from Frontiers in Neurology reported the case
of a woman who, one night, suddenly began to hear music playing in her head,
like a sort of internal, unstoppable jukebox (Vitorovic & Biller, 2013).
The problem continued for months.
When she hummed the songs to her husband, he recognised some
of them, but she herself didn’t know what they were or where they came from.
It seemed the songs were so deeply rooted in her memory that
she wasn’t consciously aware she knew them. They only came to the surface
during these night-time hallucinations.
She was treated with an anti-seizure medication and her
symptoms improved a little.
This is the only known case of this kind of musical
hallucination.
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