It is no coincidence that people remember certain events of their lives because of music.
Georgia Institute of Technology psychology researcher Yiren Ren and others published a new study This showed how listening to music can not only refresh memories but also change the way people remember them.
Ren’s mentor, Thackery Brown, and music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie of the University of Colorado Boulder also participated in the study, which analyzed the relationship between music, emotion, and memory.
They developed a 3-day episodic memory task with separate encoding, recall, and retrieval phases to reach their primary hypothesis.
On the first day, participants recalled a series of short, emotionally neutral stories.
The next day, they recalled the stories while listening to 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 the music.
On the second day, participants’ brain activity was recorded with an fMRI scan, which detects changes in brain blood flow.
From the results of the study, participants who listened to emotional music while recalling neutral stories were more likely to add an emotional element to the story.
Another finding was that participants who memorized stories while listening to music had increases in the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain’s emotional center, which plays an important role in learning and memory.
Additionally, fMRI scans showed “altered neural connectivity” during story recall with music, as opposed to story recall in silence.
According to the study, there is also evidence of communication between the emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the visual sensory processing parts of the brain.
In other words, music has the ability to impart emotional details into memories.
Ren said that “although further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and medicine.”
The study also looked at how music can affect the memories of people struggling with depression, PTSD or other problems. mental health conditions,
For those individuals, their negative memories can be made more positive and reduced over time by “carefully chosen music”.
The study reported that, based on these findings, music-based methods could be used in the treatment of mental health conditions.
Overall, the study found a clear and positive relationship between music and memory.
The study concludes, “These findings highlight the interplay between music, emotion, and memory, providing insight into the consequences of incorporating emotional music into memory recall processes.”
