Health

Why do we miss music and forget everything else


For many, music is like a part of our subconscious. It continuously plays in the background, whether we are at a coffee shop, in an elevator, working from home or even just walking down the street. Each year, Spotify tells us how many minutes we spent listening to music. I’ve spent 53,402 minutes in 2021—17 hours a week—that’s more time than I’ve spent doing most other things. In 2017, Nielsen estimated that Americans spend more than 32 hours a week listening to music on average. No wonder we have a strong memory for music and can easily recall lyrics and melodies, even if we haven’t heard them in years.

In March, a new spin-off of Wordle called Heard launch. It tests musical memory by asking people to identify a song after listening to just one second of it, and for each wrong guess, prolongs the track by one second. I’m happy to have a place to use my musical knowledge, and I’m not the only one. Millions of players have used Heardle to identify popular and nostalgic songs from generations ranging from the Fugees to the Spice Girls to Adele.

The popularity of Heardle taps into an interesting part of the human psyche: how deeply we store music in memory and how easily we can recall it. “There is an approach called gating model [which is] very similar to the Heardle app,” said Dr Kelly Jakubowski, assistant professor of music psychology at Durham University in the UK, “You present a musical note [and then two, and then three to] see how long it takes people to identify a track, so I think it’s funny that they’ve touched on that [with Heardle]. ”

Many of us can hear music in our minds, known as musical or auditory visualization. “This can happen voluntarily or intentionally, so if I [ask you to] think of the song ‘Happy Birthday’, you can hear it playing in your head right now, but it can also happen by accident. That’s what we call ear decay, when we get a song that comes to mind where you’re not really trying to recall any of the music,” says Jakubowski. It’s pretty common to have a song in your head— “around” 90% people say they have ear worms at least once a week and around many people say they get ear worms at least once a day,” she notes. As you can imagine, people who listen to or interact with music more often tend to experience more ear depth. The more we listen to music, the more it naturally comes to mind.

Apps like Heardle make you happy to play because “when we perceive or imagine music that is quite meaningful to us, we activate what we call the reward centers of the brain. set,” said Jakubowski. Listening to music releases dopamine in the brain, with our dopamine levels increasing up to 9% When we listen to music, we enjoy it. That’s one reason why music has become so intertwined with the way we express and comfort ourselves.

“Music is inherently associated with personal identity, and so [when people can] identify music without much information, it is usually the music of their youth [which can trigger] what we call the flashback bump in autobiographical memory,” says Jakubowski. “Older people have a really good memory for some of the songs of their youth because they heard the same recording over and over again… It might bring back your memories from that period of time. That’s when you have self-defining experiences.”

Listening to nostalgic pop music on Heardle can also have an emotional impact, as the music triggers an emotional response. “Even if you only identify a piece of music based on its first second, you have this musical visual experience. [that] can trigger the memory of that whole piece of music, and then you have the emotions come back associated with it,” says Jakubowski. “Musical imagery can elicit the same emotional responses as when actually listening to a piece of music.”

When we listen to a song, we not only remember the music and lyrics, but we also understand the emotion being conveyed. Dr Andrea Halpern, professor of psychology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, said: “Orienting yourself to the emotional message actually helps you remember the actual music better.”

In one Research 2010 published year Music perceptionHalpern and colleagues asked musicians to listen to the first few minutes of familiar classical music and record their assessments of the emotions they heard in the music through the value and their stimulation. The participants then performed the experiment again while only imagining the first minute of these songs playing in their mind. “The overlap in their profile is amazing, meaning they are working on this complex piece in real time and extracting the same emotions,” says Halpern. Musicians can map the emotions expressed in music even as it’s playing in their heads and imagine the music so vividly that their scores are virtually identical.

This shows that we can quite accurately reproduce some aspects of music in our minds. “Imagination of music is actually an experience very similar to musical perception,” says Jakubowski. “There [are] There is a very strong parallel in terms of brain activation that you see when you imagine the music compared to when you perceive the music. “

Our memory for music may not be perfect, but it’s still pretty impressive. In one Research 2015 published year Memory and Perception, Jakubowski, Halpern, and colleagues monitored the accuracy of our unintentional musical imagery to see how well our mental representation compared to actual music. The participants wore accelerometers on their wristwatches, and every time they had a song in mind, they tapped along to record the beat of the song. “We found that these participants, who were mostly non-musicians, fairly accurately recalled the musical tempo in the unintentional musical image,” says Jakubowski. “[59%] of the earworm is within 10% of the originally recorded tempo [which suggests that] even if people with no formal musical training still spontaneously think about music in their daily lives… that comes to mind pretty accurately, at least in terms of tempo. ”

Even if you’re not a musician, you can still get an intuitive understanding of music from how often you experience it. “We don’t have to read our favorite book or watch our favorite movie over and over, but just listen to our favorite music,” says Jakubowski. “Even non-musicians have a really accurate musical memory. It’s not that they intentionally memorize the music, they’re just exposed to the point of becoming music experts in a different way because of this accidental exposure to music. [that’s] really stand out in our world today. ”

People often wonder why we tend to remember songs and lyrics more easily than our own memories, where we kept our keys and what we learned in school. That seems to be down to how often we experience music, either in the world or in our minds, and the joy and emotional connection it gives us. Music represents who we are and how we feel, so of course it is what we remember.

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