When a person remembers something, there is a certain biological process that happens inside their brain involving a communication across neurons that allows them to recall details about a past event. Memories come in all shapes and sizes. For instance, one might have a very vivid and detailed memory about an event that happened five years ago while remembering very little about an event that happened five weeks ago. Memories can be tied to particular songs as when that song plays a certain memory is recalled automatically. Researchers at the University of North Carolina recently performed a study to figure out exactly why some memories are easier to recall in detail than others. In this post, I will summarize how the researchers working at UNC performed an experiment in which they claim that memories are formed within different levels of specificity in the brain and can be enhanced by musical ques.
The way that researchers can study the formation and recall of memory has been recently performed using function magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. This machine will scan the brain and show the parts of the brain that have the most electrical activity. Researchers utilized this by scanning the brains of subjects while asking them to recall certain events.This way they could observe the amount of electrical activity in the brain of a subject recalling memory. And in this case, the electrical activity is a direct correlate to the function of recalling memory. It was by this method that it was found that there are three different levels within the brain that use electrical activity which corresponds to levels of specificity of a memory. This is to say that the area of the brain that deals with highly specific memories will show high electrical activity when the subject is recalling a specific memory.
This particular study deals with primarily the recall of autobiographical memory. This is memory that is about oneself. For example, “I remember getting a dog for my 12th birthday”. In previous studies, it has been concluded that memory forms in three varying levels of specificity within in the brain. The third level being the most vivid type where one actually feels like they are re-experiencing the memory and the first level being more generalized memories of oneself such as “I lived in Chicago when I was 6”. The goal of this study performed by UNC was to determine how music effects the neural regions while recalling autobiographical memory.
The hypothesis of this study was towards the idea that by playing popular songs to participants, they would describe more vivid memories than participants who were asked to recall a certain event without music. This would provide the conclusion that music inspires a different neurological process than simply trying to remember an event. The study was to be performed using sixteen healthy adults between the age of 16 and 23. Each participant would then have their brain scan while listening to a popular song from the current decade. 30 songs were played and while each was playing, the subject was asked to describe in as much detail as possible what memory that the song made them think of. Also the subject was asked to rate the memory on a scale 1-4, 1 being low level of vividness and 4 being feeling as if they were reliving the memory. As they were describing the memory, the fMRI would record the electrical activity in the different regions of their brain that deal with recalling memory. There was also a control group, which is the group in an experiment that is designed to set a baseline to compare. In this case the control group was a group of subjects that were asked to simply recall a certain event such as what they did on their birthday last year. The idea was that the electrical activity of the brain while recalling with musical cues could be compared to the activity while recalling without.
The results of this study proved to be a success for the researchers. First evidence of music effecting memory recall was found in that it took participants on average about 5 seconds to recall a memory when listening to music whereas the participants without music took on average about 12 seconds to recall a memory. It was also found that the participants with musical ques on average rated their memory to be 3.2 on the vividness scale as described before whereas the average rating for participants without music was 2.3. (Giovanello, Ford, and Addis 2971-3150) This alone clearly is evidence that music effects the brains ability to recall specific memories.
Furthermore, the results of the fMRI showed different images of electrical activity between the experimental and control group (with music and without). Subjects in the experimental group showed much more electrical activity in the region of the brain that deals with level 1 memories which are the most vivid types. They also showed a fare amount of activity in the level 2 and 3 regions of the brain. Whereas subjects in the control group showed less activity in the level one region of the brain and more so in the level 2 region which deals with does not provide the really vivid details that makes you feel as if you are re-living the experience.
This study took advantage of music’s ability to cue different memory levels of auto-biographical memory specificity,and examined how patterns of neural activity differed across these different memory levels. Using musical cues also allowed participants to retrieve a wide range of memories that had not been retrieved many times previously. It was concluded that the evidence in this study serves as further support for the use of music as a retrieval cue in autobiographical memory tasks. (Giovanello, Ford, and Addis 2971-3150) It also further supports the previous claim that there are three core regions of the brain that deal with memory recall, all of which deal with different levels of specificity. So the main conclusion that this study provides is that musical cues allowed participants in to retrieve all three levels of autobiographical memory naturally, without explicit instruction. Additionally, the memories retrieved were often highly emotional (both negative and positive) while the memories retrieved in the control group were not. These findings support the use of musical cues in future studies of autobiographical memory, and may be applied to those in populations such as depressed individuals and older adults, who may experience difficulty retrieving specific memories.
Works Cited:
* Giovanello, Kelly, Jackelyn Ford, and Donna Addis. "Differential neural activity during search of specific and general autobiographical memories elicited by musical cues." Neuropsychologia. 49.11 (2011): 2971-3150. Web. 21 Sep. 2011.
* Photo credit : http://www.radpod.org/2007/09/01/polymicrogyria/
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