Music doesnt just evoke memories it can change how we remember the past: study

It’s no accident that people remember certain events in their lives because of music.Yiren Ren, a psychology researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology, and others published a new study that discovered how listening to music can not only trigger memories but can also change how people remember them.Ren’s mentor, Thackery Brown, and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie also participated in the study, which analyzed the connections between music, emotion and memory.They developed a 3-day episodic memory task with separate encoding, recollection, and retrieval phases to get to their primary hypothesis.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories.The next day, they recalled the stories while listening to either positive music, negative music, or silence.On the third and final day, they were asked to recall the stories again, this time without listening to music.The participants’ brain activity was recorded on the second day with fMRI scans, which detects changes in the brain’s blood flow.From the study’s results, participants who listened to emotional music while recalling neutral stories were more likely to add emotional elements into the story.Another finding was that there was an increase in amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, and hippocampus, which plays a vital role in learning and memory, for participants who recalled stories while listening to music.Plus, the fMRI scans showed “altered neural engagement” during story recollection with music, as opposed to story recollection in silence.There was also evidence of communication between the emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the visual sensory processing parts of the brain, according to the study.In other words, music has the ability to infuse emotional details into memories Ren noted that “while further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life...