From Music to Memories
Music travels through time and space and sends signals to our brains to inspire movement, engage memories, and help store the story of our lives.
Listening to music has many therapeutic benefits. It brings joy, causes dancing for whole body health, and awakens those rich memories. A way to highlight the impact of music on memories is to observe those experiencing Alzheimer's disease. Simple music therapy treatments like listening to music they grew up with showed just how tight a role music plays in our lives. To fully understand the art and science of music therapy like this, let’s start with how we hear sounds.
From Sound to the Ear
The science of hearing is based on wave vibrations that travel through its surrounding medium as pressure. In the air, sound travels about 340 meters per second (m/s) and because of particle density, sound travels faster through water and solids. Through water, it travels about 1500 m/s, about 5 times faster than air. Through solids like steel, sound travels 5100 m/s, about 15 times faster than air.
In the ear, the sound vibrations pass through the eardrum, three tiny bones, and a snail-shaped cochlea. The cochlea is filled with saltwater-like liquid that converts the vibrations into electrical signals that then travel to many areas of the brain.
From Music to Movement
Electrical signals travel to the far corners of the brain, from the primal cerebellum to the evolved prefrontal cortex. Subdivisions of hearing processes are organized below.
1) Rhythm responses in the body like tapping, dancing, and coordinating activates the mortar cortex, sensory cortex, visual cortex, and cerebellum.
2) “Research shows our brains create expectations when listening to a song. For example, it would determine whether a beat is steady or if the melody makes sense. But we especially like it when songs surprise us with smart, quirky changes. This analysis takes place in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.” (The Kennedy Center: Your Brain on Music)
3) The auditory cortex mainly handles the fundamental aspects of audio information such as pitch but also determines where sounds originate, processes speech, and analyzes melody and harmony.
From Music to Memory
This view of the brain is in the center, showing where the brain stores memory.
4) The hippocampus is responsible for converting short-term memory to long-term, memory retrieval, and spatial memory.
5) The amygdala forms emotional memory such as events, faces, and sense of self.
Listening to music can be like a mental time capsule of life’s chapters. With certain songs, I can remember where I was, who I was with, smells, and emotional states.
Notice how close the auditory cortex is to the hippocampus and the amygdala.
From Memories to Life
Many studies have linked listening or playing music to activating long-term memory with great detail.
A 2013 documentary, Alive Inside, shows the power of music and memory on those with Alzheimer’s. In the first 2 minutes of the documentary, simple music therapy proved to enliven self-expression, relieve emotional traumas, and encourage communication, bringing them out of debilitating isolation.
Music therapy has the power to unearth colorful experiences, formulate identity, and share wonderful memories so listen to lots of music now for your future self to look back on.
April 20, 2023
