EVERY day, our memory encodes and stores information that contributes to the construction of our identity. Emotions play a key role in the memory formation process, although scientists are still trying to determine to what extent. A new study sheds some light on this process by drawing on the power of music.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, was carried out by three researchers from the Universities of California (UCLA) and Columbia. It shows how emotions induced by music can contribute to the creation of distinct and lasting memories.
To reach this conclusion, the scientists asked songwriters to create music designed to evoke happy, anxious, sad or calm feelings, at different intensities.
They then played them to 96 adult volunteers. At the same time, the volunteers were asked to imagine stories based on several “neutral” images (not associated with positive or negative emotions) that they were shown on a computer screen.
The academics then distracted the study participants before asking them to recall the order in which they had seen the different images. They also polled them on their perception of time throughout the experiment, to see if it changed according to the music they were listening to.
Memorable character
This protocol highlighted the fact that emotional fluctuations induced by music gave a memorable character to otherwise neutral experiences, facilitating their memorisation by the brain.
“Changes in emotion evoked by music created boundaries between episodes that made it easier for people to remember what they had seen and when they had seen it,” said lead author Mason McClay, a doctoral student in psychology at UCLA, quoted in a news release.
What’s more, Mason McClay and colleagues found that music affects our notion of time. Volunteers had difficulty remembering the exact order in which images were displayed when listening to radically different melodies.
On the contrary, they had a more accurate perception of time when the music didn’t affect their emotions as much. For example, they remembered the order of the visuals more easily when they went from a neutral to a happy state than when the musical excerpts made them sad.
While this study has certain limitations, it opens up interesting perspectives on how music could be used for therapeutic purposes, particularly for people suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In stressful situations, the body secretes hormones that can affect communication between brain cells and affect the memorisation process.
Music could help remedy this by potentially addressing the memory issues associated with such disorders. – AFP Relaxnews
