Ongoing History Daily: Why do we keep going back to the music of our youth? (Part 1)
If you keep going back to the music you loved when you were young, there’s a neurological reason for this. A 2011 study at McGill in Montreal looked at the mesolimbic pathway, which is the brain circuitry that processes cocaine, sex, and music.
Between the ages of 12 and 22, it fires at an intensity you will never experience again in your life. This means that music hits harder with the brain’s reward architecture. Music gets encoded with a strength unmatched at any other time.
As you get older and are exposed to more and more new things and experiences, the brain gets into cost-benefit analysis, causing us to narrow the attention given to new music. To put it another way, old, familiar music gives you that dopamine hit without any heavy processing costs. As a result, we instinctively go back to those heavily encoded music memories.
Is there a way out of this? Yes. That’s next time.
