Summary: New research reveals that music can do more than trigger memories—it can alter their emotional tone. When participants recalled neutral stories while listening to emotionally charged music, they later remembered the stories as matching the music’s mood.
Brain scans showed increased communication between emotion, memory, and sensory processing areas, suggesting music infuses new emotional details into memories. These findings hint at music’s potential for therapeutic interventions, like reframing negative memories in depression or PTSD.
Key Facts:
- Emotional Influence: Listening to music during memory recall can change the memory’s emotional tone to match the music’s mood.
- Brain Activation: Music enhances activity in the hippocampus and amygdala, regions vital for memory and emotion processing.
- Therapeutic Potential: Music may help reframe negative memories, offering promising applications for mental health treatments.
Source: The Conversation
Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip.
People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.
Video credit: Neuroscience News
I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory.
Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.
Music, stories and memory
When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.
While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories.
Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.
We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.
On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence.
On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.
Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.
The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music.
For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.
Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.
We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.
Musical memories
Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.
While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.
For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.
On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music.
The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.
The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.
About this music, emotion, and memory research news
Author: Yiren Ren
Source: The Conversation
Contact: Yiren Ren – The Conversation
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Closed access.
“Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: an fMRI study” by Yiren Ren et al. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience
Abstract
Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: an fMRI study
Music is a powerful medium that influences our emotions and memories. Neuroscience research has demonstrated music’s ability to engage brain regions associated with emotion, reward, motivation, and autobiographical memory.
While music’s role in modulating emotions has been explored extensively, our study investigates whether music can alter the emotional content of memories.
Building on the theory that memories can be updated upon retrieval, we tested whether introducing emotional music during memory recollection might introduce false emotional elements into the original memory trace.
We developed a 3-day episodic memory task with separate encoding, recollection, and retrieval phases.
Our primary hypothesis was that emotional music played during memory recollection would increase the likelihood of introducing novel emotional components into the original memory.
Behavioral findings revealed two key outcomes: 1) participants exposed to music during memory recollection were more likely to incorporate novel emotional components congruent with the paired music valence, and 2) memories retrieved 1 day later exhibited a stronger emotional tone than the original memory, congruent with the valence of the music paired during the previous day’s recollection.
Furthermore, fMRI results revealed altered neural engagement during story recollection with music, including the amygdala, anterior hippocampus, and inferior parietal lobule.
Enhanced connectivity between the amygdala and other brain regions, including the frontal and visual cortex, was observed during recollection with music, potentially contributing to more emotionally charged story reconstructions.
These findings illuminate the interplay between music, emotion, and memory, offering insights into the consequences of infusing emotional music into memory recollection processes.
