Music and Memory: 5 Awesome New Psychology Studies

Music and Memory

Music and memory: it aids language learning, helps injured brains remember, causes widespread brain activation and more…

Music and memory have a tremendously strong link.


Psychologists have been fascinated by this connection between music and memory.

Here are five recent psychology studies which demonstrate the intimate link between music and memory.

1. Singing aids language learning




2. Music and memory: the injured brain





Compared with using a standardised interview–the Autobiographical Memory Interview–playing number-one hits to people who’d suffered TBIs was more effective in eliciting memories.

3. Widespread brain activation




The motor areas process the rhythm, the auditory areas process the sound, while the limbic regions are associated with the emotions (Alluri et al., 2013).

4. Music can take you back two generations




The study’s lead author, Carol Lynne Krumhansl, explained:



Another study has shown that we don’t even need to hear the tune to active the link between music and memory–the words are enough (Cady et al., 2008).

For a whole generation, the words “Ice, ice baby”, and for another generation “…living in the gangsta’s paradise” are enough to take them back in time.

5. A unique musical hallucination

The power of the link between music and memory is sometimes frightening.

A recent study from Frontiers in Neurology reported the case of a woman who, one night, suddenly began to hear music playing in her head, like a sort of internal, unstoppable jukebox (Vitorovic & Biller, 2013). The problem continued for months.

When she hummed the songs to her husband, he recognised some of them, but she herself didn’t know what they were or where they came from.

It seemed the songs were so deeply rooted in her memory that she wasn’t consciously aware she knew them. They only came to the surface during these night-time hallucinations.

She was treated with an anti-seizure medication and her symptoms improved a little.

This is the only known case of this kind of musical hallucination.


Image credit: flyzipper






Published: 11 December 2013

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