"Music and Memory: 5 Awesome New Psychology Studies"
Music has tremendous power over memory. Hearing an old song can take you back decades in the blink of an eye. Psychologists have been fascinated by this connection between music and memory.
Here are five recent psychology studies which demonstrate the intimate link between music and memory.
1: Singing aids language learning: The link between music and memory is so strong that it can help you learn a foreign language. Research by Ludke et al. (2013) found that people trying to learn Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language, performed much better if they sang the Hungarian phrases rather than just saying them. The researchers think that the melody may provide an extra cue which helps embed the memory.
2: Music helps injured brain remember People who have suffered traumatic brain injuries (TBIs), such as in a car accident, often have problems with memory. Music is increasingly being tested as a way to help bring back forgotten autobiographical memories.
3: Widespread brain activation One of the reasons music may be so powerful is that it activates such large areas of the brain. A recent brain imaging study found that music activated the auditory, motor and limbic (emotional) regions (Alluri et al., 2013). The study found that whether their participants were listening to the Beatles or Vivaldi, largely the same areas of the brain were active.
4: Music can take you back two generations Classic hits can easily take you back to your teens and twenties. Most people have particularly strong memories of this time in their lives–psychologists have called it the ‘reminiscence bump’. But, perhaps surprisingly, one study has shown that people also have mini reminiscence bumps for the music their parents listened to, and even for their grandparents’ music (Krumhansl & Zupnick, 2013).
5: A unique musical hallucination The power of music on people’s memory is sometimes frightening. A recent study from Frontiers in Neurology reported the case of a woman who, one night, suddenly began to hear music playing in her head, like a sort of internal, unstoppable jukebox (Vitorovic & Biller, 2013). The problem continued for months. When she hummed the songs to her husband, he recognized some of them, but she herself didn't know what they were or where they came from.
It seemed the songs were so deeply rooted in her memory that she wasn’t consciously aware she knew them. They only came to the surface during these night-time hallucinations. She was treated with an anti-seizure medication and her symptoms improved a little.
This is the only known case of this kind of musical hallucination. I on the other hand believe perhaps there is another explanation but that is another discussion. According to this research - it is apparent music and memory are closely related so I think it is perfectly reasonable to draw a connection between music causing you to reflect on a past existence your soul experienced.
-- Excerpts taken from
http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/12/mus...gy-studies.php
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