Seriously, why can I remember the entirety of multiple five-minute songs plus all of their ad-libs, but for the life of me I cannot remember what the Salisbury convention is for politics? The answer is more or less quite simple: when we listen to music that we enjoy, we become happy and tend to remember happy things. But if you’re like me and strongly dislike our education system, it becomes a lot harder to remember that James Callaghan was the first UK Prime Minister to hold all four Great Offices of State.
According to TIME, there are 3 main reasons why we find it so easy to recollect melodies.
- The more you listen to music, the more likely you are to have a more vivid and spontaneous musical or auditory imagery. This is why you can remember the entirety of the 10-minute version of All Too Well by Taylor Swift but not a three-minute Free Science Lesson video (sorry Shaun).
- When we listen to music we enjoy, we attach an emotional experience with the music which is proven to help us remember music better. Furthermore, as our dopamine levels increase with listening to enjoyable music, our memory is thusly improved in those times.
- As Dr Kelly Jakubowski stated, “Music is an omnipresent stimulus, “ making it virtually unavoidable. Everything nowadays has its signature theme tune from restaurants to your favourite video game, which creates an association in your brain with the tune and the place. If you (as a consumer of British television) were to see an ad for Jet2Holidays, you would most likely also hear Hold My Hand by Jess Glynne (criminal marketing in my opinion). Due to the repetition of certain songs or tunes, they get stuck in our heads and we have no choice but to remember them.
Check out the TIME article for a more in-depth explanation, or read Dr Kelly Jakubowski's Investigation of Musical Imagery
melinah💌
References:
Nayantara Dutta, Why We Remember Music and Forget Everything Else (April 14th 2022), accessed on: https://time.com/6167197/psychology-behind-remembering-music/
Dr Kelly Jakubowski, Investigating Temporal and Melodic Aspects of Musical Imagery (2015), accessed on: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/15076/1/PSY_thesis_JakubowskiK_2015.pdf
