Music Memory – Can’t Get That Song Out Of My Head!
I just read a fascinating interview with Matthew Schulkind, a cognitive scientist at Amherst College. He’s been studying older adults to figure out why popular songs stick in our heads so persistently. (His ultimate aim is to see if music can help his patients with dementia regain lost memories.)
He believes musical memory is memory that doesn’t take conscious thought – like throwing a ball, or walking. [This is often called “procedural memory”, compared to “declarative” memory which is for facts, like remembering a recipe for oatmeal cookies.)
Surprisingly, Older People Do NOT Have “Magical Memory” For Songs From Their Youth
He was surprised by this, but older people don’t have some savant-like ability to recall songs from their childhood. Even when prompted by the first few bars of the song. However, if they had an emotional connection to a song (meaning, the song from long ago was tied to an intensely positive or negative experience), then they were much more likely to recall the whole song perfectly.
Earworms
Earworms are those songs that get stuck in your head, and you just can’t seem to shake them! This can be very frustrating, and it is typically the simplest (and most annoying) songs too! I’m sure you all can find ways to “take your mind off” something you don’t want to h about. You basically replace the thoughts by distracting yourself with other thoughts. But it’s not so simple to get rid of these songs. Schulkind theorizes that this means musical recall must be supported b a different part of the brain than other types of thinking and memory.
Music And Lost Memories
Schulkind’s studies on using music to retrieve long term memory found, in at least one of his experiments, that listening to music from your past can certainly help recover “lost” memories, even in patients with dementia (like Alzheimer’s). This seems to indicate that part of the memory problems with dementia is recovery – the memories are still there, but the access to them is hampered.
