By Kathi Mestayer

A few months ago, lying in bed half-asleep, I heard the words: “Wake up, little Susie!” I got up and Googled it. Hearing the Everly Brothers sing it on YouTube, I had a strong memory burst. I knew that song! From way-way back! 

A few weeks later, I was listening to the NPR “Short Wave” podcast in which scientists were being interviewed about why music memories are so “sticky” in our brains. That was all it took to get me started reading, researching and learning about music and memory.

Music Memories: Lots of Pieces

The first question I had was: How do we save our music memories? Kiminobu Sugaya, Ph.D., the head of neuroscience at the University of Central Florida, says in the “Short Wave” podcast: “Music memories are saved in so many different categories. They can fit into, and link up with, a much larger number than most other memory types.” (Emphasis mine, and I have also lightly edited the quotes from other sources throughout.)

According to a 2013 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a few of the categories that we use to save, and link up, music memories, include:

• Muscle memory: if we are singing, playing an instrument, dancing, or just tapping our feet

• Word/language memory: lyrics, rhyme

• Visual memory: sheet music, piano keys, what was seen with the music

• Melody, pitch, and structure: components of “templates,” based on our prior musical exposure, that we use to process music.

Finally, the emotions that accompany music:

“Emotional music memory, especially if it is linked with pleasure, is very strong, and can be easier to retrieve than other kinds of memory,” Sugaya points out to me, in an email. “Even in normal aging, other parts of the brain get smaller, but the amygdala, which supports emotional memories, stays involved.”

He adds, “Because a variety of different parts of our brains process music, those memories are stored away in many different places. This is because music engages multiple regions of the brain simultaneously, including areas involved in auditory processing, emotional processing, and memory formation, among others. By linking these different brain regions, music can help to create rich and complex musical memories that are stored in multiple areas of the brain.”

Memory Creation and Storage

Andrew Budson, Ph.D., a professor of neurology at Boston University, and chief of cognitive and behavioral neurology for the Center for Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, explains to the Washington Post, “The different aspects of a memory—the sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and thoughts—are represented by a pattern of neural activity in different parts of the cortex, the outer surface of the brain, where the seeing, hearing, smelling, emoting, and thinking is taking place.”

Budson offers a useful metaphor for how our brains form and save music memories. Think of the brain activity that represents an event in our life as little balloons floating in different areas of the brain. “When a new memory is formed, it is as if the hippocampus is tying together the strings of the balloons, just like if you held the strings of helium balloons in your hand,” he says. “If the hippocampus was destroyed, the balloons would separate and fly away and the memory would be gone.”

For a memory to become long-lasting, it must be consolidated while we are sleeping, Budson explains. Think of the different balloons becoming linked directly to each other. After consolidation, he says, “the different balloons become linked directly to each other through heavy cords and because of this the hippocampus is no longer needed for the memory to remain intact. This is why people with Alzheimer’s disease can recall stuff from their childhood but not remember what they had for lunch or who they saw yesterday.”

Music Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease attacks the hippocampus first and foremost, affecting “episodic memory,” which requires conscious work to recall, according to Budson. It’s the first to go, when Alzheimer’s, or dementia, hits. For remembering the rhythm of the music, however, we can use a different process, called “procedural memory” (informally known as muscle memory), which is our ability to remember skills.

Some of the procedural components of musical memory can survive the hippocampus damage that impairs many other memory types. Individuals with Alzheimer’s can also retrieve memories that have been consolidated in the past—that’s why they can remember songs from their youth so well.

One example cited in the Washington Post article is the singer Tony Bennett, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2017 and, according to his wife, didn’t know he had the disease. In 2021, he performed at Radio City Music Hall with Lady Gaga. With no notes or cue cards, he sang an hour-long set from memory. 

Saving and Retrieving Music Memories

Once the brain activity “balloons” are linked during memory formation, signals go back and forth between them whenever the memory is retrieved. When, for example, a musician plays a piece again, those connections get stronger, and are preserved longer. In fact, just listening to music repeatedly helps to embed the memories. “People are much more likely to seek out, and re-listen to, music than other media,” Budson points out when I interviewed him.

Sleep also plays an important role. “During sleep, music memories get more coordinated, and linked to each other. In fact, it generally happens while we’re dreaming,” according to Budson.

Even with well-encoded memories, we often need a hint, or a cue, to find and retrieve them. In his book “This Is Your Brain on Music,” McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, Ph.D., writes, “The barrier to being able to recall everything we might want to is not that it wasn’t ‘stored’ in memory, then; rather, the problem is finding the right cue to access the memory and properly configure our neural circuits.”

“The better we encode something, the better we can retrieve it later,” according to Sugaya. “In fact, as we age, our older memories tend to remain stronger.”

“Deeply encoded music can also unlock ‘flashbulb’ memories. We remember more vivid details about events in the past when we are exposed to music,” Budson tells the Washington Post. He adds that research has shown that effect is more common with music than with familiar faces or other stimuli.

So it seems that a group of memory “balloons” had been floating around in my brain for decades, waiting to be retrieved. Finally, they got a cue, and sent a “wake up” song lyric to my auditory cortex. Maybe this is how we remember music from 50-plus years ago, but still can’t find our car keys. But it’s also all the more reason to replay our favorite songs (not too loudly), and sing along. Our brains will thank us.

Hearing Health magazine staff writer Kathi Mestayer serves on advisory boards for the Virginia Department for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and the Greater Richmond, Virginia, chapter of the Hearing Loss Association of America. To learn more about memory and aging, she recommends the book “Why We Forget and How to Remember Better,” by Andrew Budson and Elizabeth Kensinger, pubished by Oxford University Press in 2023. It includes science, insights, and advice on managing our memories as we age.

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