“Make sure you text me and let me know you made it there safe,” Lori told me. The frigid air was my uninvited companion as I quickly closed my car door and turned up the heater. Driving away, I pulled down the visor to shield the setting sun. I love teaching my night class, but the comfy couch seemed more inviting than traveling alone on a freezing night. And I knew I wouldn’t get back home till close to 10 p.m. The longer I drove, the more I felt like the truck driver at the 14-hour limit.
Then I turned Sirius XM to one of my favorite channels and heard Gregg Alexander, lead singer for the rock band, The New Radicals, singing, “But when the night is falling/You cannot find the light/You feel your dreams are dying/Hold tight/You’ve got the music in you.”
In an instant, I had time-traveled to another day, years ago, when I was mentally exhausted and emotionally drained, alone, and on the brink of quitting. Back then, that song was a catalyst, reviving my spirits and spurring me forward. Hearing it again on my way to teach recharged me. At once, my commute turned joyous; I was anxious to see my students. All because of a song.
It’s happened to me before. You’ve experienced it too. You hear a song from years ago, and suddenly you are there, in that place, perhaps with that person, feeling emotions associated with that memory.
How does a song do that to us?
It all has to do with our brain and memory, of course.
Psychologists distinguish two kinds of memory: explicit and implicit. Explicit memory is something you choose to remember, like the lesson I would teach on theology that night. The material will be on a test at some point, and students will have the joy of recalling what they’ve learned. That’s explicit memory.
Implicit memory is unconscious and automatic. It’s ingrained in the sense that it comes back to you without your thinking about it, like riding a bicycle years after you’ve been on one. Psychologists say implicit memories last longer.
We experience an emotion that is in some way connected with a song. Maybe it was that high school dance when you were all goo-goo crazy for that person. Now, every time you hear the song playing, you get goose-bumpy again.
We tend to remember songs from our teenage years and twenties more than we do later in life. Psychologists have called it the “reminiscence bump.” It makes sense: our teen years and early twenties are punctuated by emotionally significant events, like the thrill of first love and the pain of rejection, the exhilaration of finding independence, and the disappointment of knowing a painful failure. Song association with memories happens in later adult years, too. They’re just more frequent in those earlier years. Studies have found that familiar music activates regions of the brain linked to autobiographical memories. So, we hear that song years later, and we are back there again.
What’s fascinating is that people who have Alzheimer’s or some brain injuries often have healthy implicit memory systems compared to the explicit memories that have been damaged. It explains why your loved one with dementia can sing those childhood church hymns when they can remember little else.
Professor Petri Toiviainen from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland has found that listening to music ignites the auditory areas of the brain, but it also employs large-scale neural networks. Janata’s work also indicates that autobiographical memories linked to music seem to be spared in people with Alzheimer’s disease. One of his long-term goals is to use this research to help develop music-based therapy for people with the disease. Let’s hope he’s successful.
I turned the sound down as I pulled into the parking lot. Gregg Alexander was closing with words that could be an aphorism for our life experience: “Don’t give up/Can’t forget/Don’t let go.”
And so it was, and so it is: for me that night, and for others, especially those less fortunate ones, holding to the string of a memory, dangling on the notes of a song.