Music is known to heal emotions and listening to the right selection helps alleviate painful memories. — AFP
With the holiday season now upon us, many people will be listening to Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas is You or Wham!’s Last Christmas.
These songs don’t just put us in a festive mood, they also awaken deeply buried memories.
A research from the United States, published in the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, says that they can even rewrite them.
The field of neuroscience is increasingly interested in music, as it mobilises a multitude of cognitive, perceptual, motor and emotional functions.
When we listen to music, the hippocampus – the seat of memory – and the amygdala, the heart of emotions – work in concert.
This powerful tandem explains why certain melodies leave such a deep emotional imprint on our minds.
A research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and the University of Colorado Boulder wondered whether music might not only revive memories, but also modify their emotional content.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers devised a three-day experiment.
First, they asked several participants to memorise short, emotionally neutral stories.
The following day, the volunteers were asked to recall these stories under various conditions (listening to happy music, sad music or in silence).
During this stage, the scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to visualise the participants’ brain activity.
Finally, on the third day, the volunteers were asked to recall the memorised stories, but without any background music.
The results were surprising.
When participants recalled neutral stories while listening to emotionally-charged music, they unconsciously added details reflecting the mood of the piece.
As a result, the stories they recalled while listening to happy music were perceived as more positive than they originally were.
Conversely, those recalled with melancholy music seemed sadder in their memories.
“Music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone,” explains Yiren Ren, one of the coauthors of the study, in an article for The Conversation.
Brain scans taken during the experiment attest to the fascinating power of music.
Listening to music strongly stimulates the hippocampus and amygdala, demonstrating just how intimately memory and emotion are linked.
These regions also interact with areas of the brain involved in visual processing, as if music made the memories more vivid and emotionally charged.
This discovery could well revolutionise the way we approach mental health.
The right musical selection could, for example, enable people with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder to revisit painful memories with a more positive tone. — AFP Relaxnews
