Emotions play a key role in the memory formation process, although scientists are still trying to determine to what extent. A recent study sheds some light on this process by drawing on the power of music.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research was carried out by experts from the Universities of California (UCLA) and Columbia, and 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.
The volunteers were asked to simultaneously imagine stories based on several “neutral” images – that is, not associated with positive or negative emotions – shown on a computer screen.
The academics then distracted the participants before asking them to recall the order in which they had seen the 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.
This highlighted the fact that emotional fluctuations induced by music gave 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.
The experts further found that music affects the 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 those who suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.
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 memory issues associated with such disorders.