Read Online You Are the Music: How Music Reveals What it Means to be Human by Victoria Williamson - Free Book Online
Authors: Victoria Williamson
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or drive a car) to being more automatic; from being conscious to non-conscious. But we do know that memories move from the systems that demand heavy resources, episodic and semantic memory, into the more lowdemand implicit memory system. 27 This means that when music becomes a skill, when it becomes a habit, it gains a great deal of power in the mind in terms of longevity and resistance to decay.
For someone who has had a degree of musical training, musical memory also becomes partly procedural – a term used to refer to the motor- or movement-based aspect of memory. Amnesia and other memory disorders are characterised by the loss of conscious memory processes while the implicit procedural memory systems are, by comparison, spared. 28
Clive and PM may have lost access to the episodic memories of their music lessons and careers but they do not need to access these conscious memories in order to be able to play their instruments. The rest of us do not need to remember our childhood cycle lessons in order to be able to ride a bike.
Another reason why musical memories survive is again linked to the implicit memory system but has to do with emotional reactions. Our emotional responses to music are often formed through conditioned responses; for example, I am more likely to have a positive emotional reaction to music in a major key as my memories of happy music, as a Western tonal music listener, have been mostly linked to music in the major key. Conditioned emotional responses such as this also tend to survive in memory disorders.
There are some physical clues in the brain as to why the implicit memory system survives well in extreme cases of memory loss. Emotional reactions are at least partly driven by the activity of central brain systems such as the amygdala. In previous chapters we discussed how amygdala activation has frequently been measured in response to hearing emotional music.
The amygdala, with its central location, has a higher likelihood of surviving brain damage as compared to an area such as the frontal cortex when it comes to brain swelling or a blow to the head. Therefore an individual may lose the conscious memories of why a piece of music causes them to feel a certain way (thanks to the destruction of areas around thefrontal cortex) but still experience the core feeling (thanks to the activity of the amygdala).
So, to sum up, apart from the nature of music itself, musical memories survive at least in part because music activates brain systems that 1) are more likely to survive the more common types of brain damage, and 2) drive non-conscious and conditioned implicit responses to stimuli, such as motor and emotional behaviours. Musical memories really do, in every sense, become part of our inner being.
‘The Miscreant’
So far in this chapter I have talked about the great and good of musical memory; the natural learner and the strong survivor. In the interests of fairness and giving a balanced view, it is only right that I finish this chapter with a discussion of the naughty side of musical memory.
Ever had a tune stuck in your head? A little ditty or perhaps even a longer song or musical piece that goes round and round in your mind’s ear? If the statistics are right then over 90 per cent of you should be nodding ‘yes’ at this stage. 29 If you have never experienced a tune stuck in your head then you are in rare company. Some people experience repeating music in their minds so frequently that they claim to have an almost constant musical soundtrack to their daily lives. 30
We currently refer to this phenomenon as involuntary musical imagery, but in everyday lingo it is most commonly known as an ‘earworm’, a translation of the German term Ohrwurm . This experience has had many labels in the past, including ‘brain worm’, ‘sticky music’, 31 ‘cognitive itch’ 32 and ‘stuck song syndrome’. 33 In my lab, day in and day out, we call these stuck tunes earworms, so I will use that
For someone who has had a degree of musical training, musical memory also becomes partly procedural – a term used to refer to the motor- or movement-based aspect of memory. Amnesia and other memory disorders are characterised by the loss of conscious memory processes while the implicit procedural memory systems are, by comparison, spared. 28
Clive and PM may have lost access to the episodic memories of their music lessons and careers but they do not need to access these conscious memories in order to be able to play their instruments. The rest of us do not need to remember our childhood cycle lessons in order to be able to ride a bike.
Another reason why musical memories survive is again linked to the implicit memory system but has to do with emotional reactions. Our emotional responses to music are often formed through conditioned responses; for example, I am more likely to have a positive emotional reaction to music in a major key as my memories of happy music, as a Western tonal music listener, have been mostly linked to music in the major key. Conditioned emotional responses such as this also tend to survive in memory disorders.
There are some physical clues in the brain as to why the implicit memory system survives well in extreme cases of memory loss. Emotional reactions are at least partly driven by the activity of central brain systems such as the amygdala. In previous chapters we discussed how amygdala activation has frequently been measured in response to hearing emotional music.
The amygdala, with its central location, has a higher likelihood of surviving brain damage as compared to an area such as the frontal cortex when it comes to brain swelling or a blow to the head. Therefore an individual may lose the conscious memories of why a piece of music causes them to feel a certain way (thanks to the destruction of areas around thefrontal cortex) but still experience the core feeling (thanks to the activity of the amygdala).
So, to sum up, apart from the nature of music itself, musical memories survive at least in part because music activates brain systems that 1) are more likely to survive the more common types of brain damage, and 2) drive non-conscious and conditioned implicit responses to stimuli, such as motor and emotional behaviours. Musical memories really do, in every sense, become part of our inner being.
‘The Miscreant’
So far in this chapter I have talked about the great and good of musical memory; the natural learner and the strong survivor. In the interests of fairness and giving a balanced view, it is only right that I finish this chapter with a discussion of the naughty side of musical memory.
Ever had a tune stuck in your head? A little ditty or perhaps even a longer song or musical piece that goes round and round in your mind’s ear? If the statistics are right then over 90 per cent of you should be nodding ‘yes’ at this stage. 29 If you have never experienced a tune stuck in your head then you are in rare company. Some people experience repeating music in their minds so frequently that they claim to have an almost constant musical soundtrack to their daily lives. 30
We currently refer to this phenomenon as involuntary musical imagery, but in everyday lingo it is most commonly known as an ‘earworm’, a translation of the German term Ohrwurm . This experience has had many labels in the past, including ‘brain worm’, ‘sticky music’, 31 ‘cognitive itch’ 32 and ‘stuck song syndrome’. 33 In my lab, day in and day out, we call these stuck tunes earworms, so I will use that
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