music and memory

As a musician, I'm interested in memory because memorizing has been a large part of my craft: large works like sonatas and concerti. I analyze the music into sections and remember it according to numbers or letters. According to neuroscientists, the process I've used is called "chunking", a process of tying together units of information into groups and remembering the group as a whole rather than in individual pieces. I'm also interested in music and memory because my grandmother had dementia and I've observed as a caregiver music brought her some meausre of quality of life in those lonely and uncharted years.

Here are 6 cool facts about music and memory.

1) Music becomes cross-coded with the events of our lives. That is why music is linked to the events in our personal history. One theory suggests that it may be due to the location of where our feelings our processed in proximity to where our memories are tagged for storage in the brain. Music is often a part life events and passage that are lived with emotions - joy, sorrow, excitement, anxiety - and therefore linked to a memory i.e. weddings, school dances, parades, sporting events. No wonder when I hear Sunshine on My Shoulders, I think about a particular time and place with Rob...

2) Music triggers associations through melodic traces and is filtered through schema, the brain's processing framework. Schemas are developed through acculturation and experience as are musical schemas so that when we hear a new musical idiom, our brains try to make an association and contextualize the new sounds creating memory links between a particular set of notes, a particular time and set of events. That explains why East Indian music doesn't come naturally to me. I'm developing schema and trying to process it through a Western musician's ears.

3) Remembering is the process of recruiting the same group of neurons used in perception of an image and pulling them together again. Barriers to memory retrieval may not be about storage, but about the cues to get at the memory. The implications may be that music is a powerful cue to "re-member" neuron groupings. According to another study, music recognition may be spared in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. I totally see that at the nursing home when I'm doing music with residents - especially with Christmas music.

4) Music may act as a trigger for procedural behaviors. Lullabies may cue babies or young children to sleep. Music with a steady beat may cue exercises like in Pilates or Yoga. Teachers may use music to reinforce behavioral routines such as quiet time, clean up time, circle time. I've used this when I taught in a classroom and with my own children at bedtime. It is fabulous for creating nurturing structures.

5)Music activates areas in both brain hemispheres and this reason alone makes it a viable therapeutic option.Music may be encoded in multiple sites in the brain as well. Reading music may be encoded in semantic memory while automated responses like toe tapping in reflexive memory. General music listening may be stored in our episodic memory. This was new to me, but makes sense with ADRD folks I know where they can't remember what they had for lunch, but can remember 4 verses of a song.

6) Earworms are short musical phrases or segments that get played over and over again in our minds. An earworm is a neural circuit that gets stuck in short term memory and happens mostly with hooks of jingles and simple melodies, and sometimes with tones or words. Such a clever device for musicians to use...

Copyright 2010, Bev Foster