Music unlocks memories and defines us - but how?

They seem so utterly absorbed in it and happily shut off from their surroundings. I get the feeling they’re thinking ‘oh well, at least I have my music’. After all, “Music is the medicine of the mind,” American playwright John Logan once said.

There has been quite a bit of research on music's power on the human psyche over the years and how it is intrinsically linked to our development. Why do we recognise certain songs at lightning speed? Why can a tear fall onto our cheeks during the first minute of a love song? We can barely grasp what happened to us in those split seconds, just that it felt mysterious and powerful at the same time. Why can a Madonna or Bon Jovi song make a middle-aged person leap onto the dancefloor? Why do those nostalgic feelings come flooding back when we rediscover a mix tape carefully compiled for us by an ex tapping into feelings that should be long gone and carrying the story of our relationship?

Headphones are a common sight

I think one of the best ideas ever for a radio show was Desert Island Discs, which has now become Britain’s longest running radio programme, conceived and originally presented by broadcaster Roy Plomley in 1942. The question is: if you were cast away on a desert island with no contact with the outside world, which eight records would you take with you and why? Mmmm… tricky! It has evolved into an important national show, proving that "music provides a superb gateway to our personal autobiographies".’

Recently, neurologist Professor Catherine Loveday led a University of Westminster research team analysing the music choices of guests on Desert Island Discs. Her fundamental question was: Why do the songs we first heard as teenagers and in our twenties automatically have such a potent effect on us?

Professor Loveday discovered that music we listen to between the age of 10 and 30 actually defines us for the rest of our lives. Loveday’s research confirms that the brain’s memory systems are at their most efficient during late adolescence and early adulthood. It is a time in our lives when we also experience many other things for the first time. So much so that this significant phase has been called ‘the self-defining period’ characterised by enduring memories that support our sense of who we are. Songs are associated with specific events or relationships. “Guests frequently chose songs because they were related to…(teenage) memories…relating to this very important developmental period in our life.” Loveday confirmed.

This would explain why the first few bars of The Stranglers' No More Heroes takes me to the depths within seconds and transports me back to 1978, when my brother was playing it full blast in his bedroom while I was in the room next door painting the interior of a cardboard box blue that was to be my Daisy doll’s bedroom.

Or being transported straight back to my 14-year-old self on a school ski-trip and introducing a few schoolfriends to some Italian Europop. The coach driver let me play some Marcella Bella, a famous Italian pop star from the mid-1980s. About a group of ten of us all sang and swayed in unison to the chorus of ‘Nell’Arrriiiaaaa’ as we drove through the Alps. Whenever I hear that song now, I regress to that inner time and space of being ‘me’ then, to those buoyant holiday feelings of the rough and tumble of school camaraderie. All that from one song.

Many of us can recognise a song from the briefest of snatches

Few would disagree that specific music becomes part of our personal ‘memoryscape,’ part of our individual history both emotionally and socially. Psychologists are now expanding their research and studying music-evoked autobiographical memories, or MEAMs. Fresh studies are taking place into how we can make those memories accessible into older age enabling us to access those feelings. Questions need to be explored such as ‘What role does music play in the maintenance and retrieval of memories?’

The benefits of this research could be highly significant in tackling various mental and emotional imbalances. For instance, how music can be an effective cue if a patient’s memory function has become impaired. Researchers maintain that much more work needs to be done on probing music-related memories across our entire lifespans.

In 2019 a Music and Lifetime Memories conference was held at Durham University. Twenty speakers from various disciplines spoke, including Professor Loveday. New paradigms were explored for eliciting musical memories in controlled experiments. Anthropologists also contributed their research on how collective memories connect us culturally.

Earlier research from 2013 led by Dr Carol Krumhansl, Professor of Psychology at New York’s Cornell University, has discovered a phenomenon commonly known as cascading ‘reminisce bumps’ wherein “Music transmitted from generation to generation shapes autobiographical memories…and emotional responses." Apparently, we are also drawn to music from our parents’ teenage years! As children we instinctively realise that the family group will secure our survival and connect with our loved ones’ music. In this way, the music from the home environment plays a bonding role and transmits through two generations.

A few birthdays ago on holiday on a P&O Cruise, I was sitting there mildly inebriated, sipping Martini on the rocks at the 'disco’ when Sister Sledge’s 1979 We Are Family came on. Suddenly a handful of us roughly in our late forties and fifties got up to dance. Why did we lose our inhibitions when that track came on? The sweet dulcet tones of Kathy Sledge’s voice those first few bars and words. “Everyone can see we’re together/As we walk on by/and we fly just like birds of a feather/ I won’t tell no lie…” Not only because it is such an ebullient song, but because it drew us into our very personal time-tunnels, which ran parallel to each others. What a joy!

This song had instantly boosted our mood and united us with the zeitgeist of our childhood years. Strangely, it plugged us in, inspired us, drew us back, comforted and reanimated us. It may have to remain a mystery, as no amount of analytical data can express the mystical complexity that the immediacy of music bestows upon us as we merge with it. I don’t mind not knowing what was happening, but it certainly felt like ‘optimal flow.’ Even Einstein confirmed that if he had not been a physicist, he would have been a musician, stating: “I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

• Marisa Laycock moved to St Albans in 2000. She enjoys sharing her experiences of living in the city. These columns are also available as podcasts from 92.6FM Radio Verulam at www.radioverulam.com/smallcitylife