05 February 2024 , 17:42
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Music has a mysterious deep and emotional power, one that’s almost impossible to put into words. You only have to think about the Liverpool football fans at Anfield stadium singing You’ll Never Walk Alone.
To examine our response to it, UCLA researchers have used music to manipulate the emotions of volunteers doing simple tasks on a computer. And they found that emotions could mould ordinary experiences into memorable events. Or, as lead author Mason McClay puts it, music makes it easier for people to remember what they’d seen and when they’d seen it.
“We think this finding has great therapeutic promise for helping people with PTSD and depression,” he added. We use two processes to turn experiences into memories. The first integrates our memories with specific occasions, while the other expands and separates each memory as the experience recedes into the past.
The power of song is clear from anyone who has watched a major football match (LIVERPOOL ECHO)There’s a constant tug of war between integrating memories and separating them, and it’s this push and pull that helps form distinct memories. “It’s like putting items into boxes for long-term storage,” said assistant professor of psychology at UCLA, David Clewett.
“When we need to retrieve a piece of information, we open the box that holds it. What this research shows is that emotions seem to be an effective box for doing this sort of organisation and for making memories more accessible.”
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And music helps. The authors believe this is why Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has created vivid, lasting memories. Her concerts contain meaningful chapters that can be opened and closed to relive highly emotional experiences.
McClay, Clewett and Matthew Sachs at Columbia University commissioned music designed to elicit joyous, anxious, sad or calm feelings. Participants then listened to the music while imagining a story to accompany neutral images on a computer screen, such as a watermelon slice, a wallet or a soccer ball. They also used the computer mouse to track moment-to-moment changes in their feelings. The results suggest that a change in emotion elicited by listening to music was cementing memories.
“This tells us that intense moments of emotional change and suspense, like the musical phrases in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, could be remembered as having lasted longer than less emotive experiences of similar length,” McClay said.
When longer-term memory was assessed there was better memory for moments when emotions changed, especially if they were intense positive emotions. Clewett said these findings could help people reintegrate the memories that have caused post-traumatic stress disorder.