How songs are irrevocably linked to past relationships, according to science
We all have that one memory of a song or a record that is linked to someone that we would much rather forget.
Maybe you can no longer listen to your once-favourite band because they remind you of an ex, or maybe they put you on to a song that brings back every memory, the good, the bad and the ugly, from your time together. Maybe there is a memory that isn’t so terrible, but reminds you of the sadness from something or someone left behind. Our brain’s ability to store such memories in its recesses is an uncanny one, and, working with the soundwaves of a song, it can bring memories rushing back that we may not be conscious of holding.
While we can vengefully blame our past relationships for tarnishing an artist or song for us, forever, there is a science behind why pieces of music spark such significant reactions in us. PBS NewsHour sought to find out why music-evoked memories continue to linger in our brains, and whether or not we will ever be able to forget them.
Kelly Jakubowski, a music psychologist at England’s Durham University, explains that “earworms”, songs that easily and inexplicably get stuck in our heads, have a lot in common with music-evoked autobiographical memories, stating, “Both are everyday experiences, and both are involuntary memory processes.” Jakubowski’s lab began studying any possible correlations to genre, specifically, asking whether there is a specific association with memories.
While it is hard to differentiate a genre’s effects, Jakubowski’s lab did find a pattern: sad songs tend to trigger autobiographical memories for a large number of people. “Because music is coupled to these very emotional events, it can be a really effective cue to bring back the strong emotions that we felt at the moment when the event initially happened,” Jakubowski says. “It was quite surprising to me how many reports we had of music evoking memories of ex-partners like ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends.” In contrast, happy memories are triggered by a wider range of genres, differing from person to person based on their usual listening habits.
The ways in which our brains store memories play a significant role in which glimpses of our past resurface, and when. Music naturally stimulates our eardrums, sending signals to “the parts of the brain on the sides”, as Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California Davis, explains, called the auditory cortex, comprised of two drums of nerve cells. The auditory cortex then transmits these sensations to various corners of the brain to process, triggering areas that can affect our speech and motor regions. Hence, music makes us sing, dance and think.
Over more than a decade of research, Janata’s lab has scanned brains to find out which sections hold our musical autobiographies. Most often referenced for storing and recalling all of our memories is the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped brain region. However, Janata found that this region is not the sole governor of memories. He explains, “We actually don’t find the hippocampus to be activated with music-evoked memories unless we instruct our participants to really, really focus on retrieving the details of the memory.” With this, those random memories we have when listening to a song that, say, reminds us of an ex, seem to activate from another part of the brain, and, as Janata says, the hippocampus is not engaged any more than usual.
Rather, these spontaneous memories begin right behind our foreheads, in a brain area called the medial prefrontal cortex. It is here, as Janata explains, that we store a lot of self-referential information. “When you think about your personal past or when you think about your friends and significant others,” Janata explains, “that’s the part of the brain that becomes activated.”
Janata’s team studied fMRI scans of their subjects’ brains in 2009, finding that the medial prefrontal cortex had the most significant reflection of people experiencing strong details and emotions when cued by song-based memories. In short, the brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex affects the vividness of one’s music-evoked memory. This explains why, for instance, people who suffer from Alzheimer’s dementia still seem to respond strongly to music from their past, and can even continue to tell stories associated with music, Janata explains: the hippocampus is compromised first, before areas like the medial prefrontal cortex.
In tandem with the medial prefrontal cortex, a primal nerve region called the striatum, located deep within the brain, governs our emotions, says Dr Alex Pantelyat, co-founder and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Music and Medicine. This region can prompt sensations when listening to music, for instance, giving you the chills when listening to a specific song. In 2011, a study trying to quantify these chills found that music causes dopamine, a neurotransmitter linked to pleasure, among other sensations, to fill two pockets of the striatum.
However, these surges happen at different times in the musical experience: before a song starts, dopamine enters the striatum’s caudate nucleus, anticipating the beginning. Then, once the music starts, the dopamine moves into the striatum’s nucleus accumbens. These reactions feed into the medial prefrontal cortex, which uses them to decide if a moment in time will be stored in your autobiographical memories. The medial prefrontal cortex, then, is the central hub of emotional, physical and musical experience.
Janata says, “What we’re finding now is that when you get a song stuck in your head, that’s actually helping to consolidate these memories.” His latest research finds that a song repeating in your mind improves not only your chances of remembering the piece of music, but also all of the memories you’ve connected with it. So, while some memories may be so horrific, we try our best to forget, both Janata and Pantelyat say that, as far as research goes, there is no way to disconnect feelings from music-evoked memories.
For now, our past relationships and the soundtracks associated with them are here to stay.
