Ongoing History Daily: Music can change how we remember the past
We’ve all experienced situations when hearing a song transports us back to when we first heard it or something we were doing when the song came on. A study by Yiren Ren, a psychologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, says that not only can music trigger memories, but it can also change the way we remember them.
The research involved exposing volunteers to stories and various types of music over three days. At the same time, they were hooked up to an fMRI machine to monitor blood flow in the brain. When it was all over, these volunteers were asked to recount what they remembered about the stories they heard. People who listened to emotional music while recalling the stories added more emotion to their descriptions. Monitoring their brains showed that emotional memory processing indicated “altered neutral engagement.”
In other words, the music affected the emotional content of the encoded memories. This means that music can add false elements to a memory. More research is being done.
