Musical Nostalgia: The Psychology and Neuroscience Behind It

Source

Stern, M. J. (2014, Aug. 12). Neural Nostalgia: Why do we love the music we heard as teenagers? Retrieved from

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/08/musical_nostalgia_the_psychology_and_neuroscience_for_song_preference_and.html

Summary

          This is an article written recently for the “Science” section of Slate.com, an online magazine also featuring stories on current affairs, business, and the arts.  The author (who does not have a background in neuroscience) laments a time when all of his favourite music was abundantly heard on radio and television, and—like almost every other person over 20—expresses his dissatisfaction with the insipid popular songs of today.  He asks: “Why do the songs I heard when I was a teenager sound sweeter than anything I listen to as an adult?” 

          Recent studies have shown that music that catered to our tastes and preferences as adolescents has greater power over our emotions than music we listen to at any other point in our lives.  This is because our auditory system “binds” us to the music we hear as teenagers, a connection that stays with us throughout the remainder of our life.  This means that the cultural phenomenon of nostalgia has clear neurological roots—other music just doesn’t please our ears as much as the sounds heard during the development stages of adolescence.

          It is obvious that listening to music can elicit powerful emotions, mixed feelings, and memories by engaging our auditory, premotor, parietal, and prefrontal cortex.  PET and fMRI brain imaging techniques show that the release of chemicals that make us feel good after music-listening depends largely on our personal preference.  Listening to our favourite music (versus listening to music we are impartial to) releases a greater amount of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.  But how do we come to prefer certain kinds of music over others in the first place?  The most rapid neurological development to our brains happens between the ages of 12 and 22.  When listening to songs at that age that we like, our brains make strong neural connections to it, consequently creating strong memories about the events associated with those songs.  Due to an excessive amount of pubertal growth hormones the memories are also full of heightened emotion, and those songs/events are perceived to be overly important.

          The author also notes that musical preference developed in our teenage years is closely tied with our social lives.  Adolescence is often a time for establishing one’s identity, and music is one way of discovering and expressing it.  This, in combination with a phenomenon where autobiographical memories are disproportionately remembered for events in adolescence and early adulthood called the “reminiscence bump” (Rathbone et al. 2008; Krumhansl & Zupnick 2013), causes music that we are drawn to as teenagers to become a part of our self-image for life. 

Reflection

It seems like the music that makes us nostalgic, as well as our lifelong enjoyment of it, is literally wired into our brains.  Music can not only provoke feelings of nostalgia, but become nostalgia itself.  Songs can become memories or feelings per se, or lead us down a path of other memories to a notable event in our lives.  Songs, much like smells, can become associated with one particular memory.  In the same way that suddenly smelling something akin to an ex-lover’s perfume, your mother’s apple pie, or your cedar cabin at the summer camp you went to when you were 14, can immediately transport you back to that time in your life, music can also guide (or force) our escape into the past. 

What’s more fascinating is music’s potential to facilitate autobiographical memory.  This does not only apply to people with normal memory recollection (Schulkind et al. 1999), but also for those who have severe acquired brain injuries, or ABIs (Baird & Samson 2014).  These are called “music-evoked autobiographical memories” or MEAMs, and have already been consistently identified in the healthy population.  In Baird & Samson’s recent study (the first study of MEAMs after ABI), MEAMs were compared with verbal-evoked autobiographical memories, and in the majority of cases music was more efficient at evoking autobiographical memories than the verbal prompts (2014).  The results suggest that music is a powerful stimulus for eliciting autobiographical memories, and may be valuable in the rehabilitation of autobiographical amnesia (ibid).

Furthermore, according to the reminiscence bump research (see Rathbone, Moulin, & Conway 2008, for example), these music-evoked autobiographical memories might very well be from our teenage and early adulthood years.  Adolescence is also the first time when we discover music for ourselves, and find out what really suits us.  Jourdain says that music can “suit” us in two different ways: socially and anatomically (1997).  People can often be attracted to certain genres of music because they serve a function in their lives, whether it be for dancing, relaxation, or meeting new people.  Many also fall into certain genres in their youth to conform or belong to a certain group; they listen to what their friends listen to.  Identity and social acceptance, however, have little to do with the actual anatomy of an individual’s inner ear or the neurology of their auditory cortex.  I would go as far as to say that individual variability in these regions is the reason why people initially gravitate to a particular style of music in the first place.  But from there, the preferred musical style is “imprinted” onto our brains, causing our auditory systems to develop toward that genre during the final years of normal musical development (Jourdain 1997, p.263).

To Jourdain it seems that all further branching of musical tastes and preferences are forever in the shadow of the music of our youth.  The neural connections we made with personally-relevant music in adolescence might well dominate all of our further perception of other kinds of music.  This doesn’t mean, however, that people who still enjoy music from their teenage years are musically stunted individuals.  Yes, that music might still evoke a strong emotional reaction decade after decade, but that reaction is generally automatic and involuntary.  And it doesn’t at all thwart the evolution or strength of our musical tastes, because the more we listen—and the more we learn to listen—the wider the variety of music we mature to understand and enjoy.

References

Baird, A., & Samson, S. (2014). Music evoked autobiographical memory after severe acquired brain injury: Preliminary findings from a case series. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 24(1), 125-143.

Jourdain, R. (1997). Music, the brain, and ecstasy: How music captures our imagination. New York: W. Morrow.

Krumhansl, C., & Zupnick, J. (2013). Cascading reminiscence bumps in popular music. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2057-2068.

Rathbone, C., Moulin, C., & Conway, M. (2008). Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self. Memory & Cognition, 36(8), 1403-1414.

Schulkind, M., Hennis, L., & Rubin, D. (1999). Music, emotion, and autobiographical memory: They’re playing your song. Memory & Cognition, 27(6), 948-955.