The summer I was 13, and the following two summers, before I turned 16 and could apply for a “real” job, I worked at Tasty Freeze, a local frozen custard shop owned by a friend of my older brother, Jack. I suppose there was some abuse of child-labor rules, but I loved the work, the extra cash, and the opportunity to hang out with my so-cool, older co-workers, Theresa and Liz. They had driver’s licenses, boyfriends, and teenage tales that likely gave my mother pause when I shared them at our dinner table. I have wonderful memories of those summers and many of them have a soundtrack—music that played in the background of those life events, including “I’m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow,” sung wildly off-key by Theresa as we spun up milkshakes and hot fudge sundaes, dancing around between the chocolate and vanilla custard machines; and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” the ballad of Liz’s latest boyfriend breakup.
And the list goes on, with those events and feelings as fresh as if it was today.
A 2023 article by Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, a music psychologist at Durham University in the UK, explains how it is that music can take you back to where you were, who you were with, and the feelings associated with that memory.
“This experience,” Jakubowski says, “when music brings back memories of events, people, and places from our past—is known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory.” And it’s a common experience. This type of memory is involuntary; the recall of the paired music and life event happens spontaneously and without any deliberate effort.
Recent research has begun to uncover why music appears to be such a good cue for invoking memories. Because music tends to accompany many distinctive life events, such as proms, graduations, weddings, and funerals, it can play an important role in reconnecting us with these self-defining moments. In fact, researchers have documented a phenomenon called the “reminiscence bump,” which says that people tend to disproportionately recall memories from when they were 10-30 years old.
In addition, music often captures our attention, due to the way it affects us, both physically and emotionally. When it draws our attention, this increases the likelihood that it will be encoded in memory together with details of a life event. The encoding of music in multiple areas of the brain means it is able to serve as an effective cue for remembering; the music/life-event pair has the potential to be retrieved from any one of several places where memories are stored.
Dr. Jakubowski and her colleague also found that the emotional nature of a piece of music plays an important role in how serves as a memory cue.
In a series of four studies, published in the journal, Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, they compared music with other emotional memory cues. Emotional sounds, such as nature and factory noises, and emotional words, such as “money” and “tornado,” were rated for their expression of particular emotions. Jakubowski then compared the emotional sounds and words with music to see if there was a difference in how many memories each elicited.
When compared with the sounds or words, music didn’t elicit a greater quantity of memories, but music evoked more consistently positive memories than sounds or words, the other emotional cues. This was especially the case for negative emotional stimuli. What a happy surprise to discover that not only does music enhance our ability to recall past life events, but sad and angry music does a better job than sad or angry words of evoking positive memories and reconnecting us with emotionally positive moments from our pasts. I love counter-intuitive research findings!
Do your own experiment—listen to a favorite song or two from your teens or early 20s and see if you can time travel like I did.
Meet you at the chocolate custard machine!
Music from
My distant past doesn’t help me to remember specific details of events surrounding the listening to the piece of music but it evokes overwhelming emotions that were associated with that specific time of my life like a first love or
Traumatic breakup or getting my first car and cruising the business district people
Watching.