musical memories

Y’all- rarely do I blow my own mind. But tonight, I did just that.

I was typing the word “accept” and had to momentarily consider whether it or its homonym “except” was appropriate. The thought train took me to “accept is a verb” and “except is a …. what is it?…. ah yes, preposition.”

And then, I spontaneously busted out in a song that I have not heard nor sang in sixteen years. You see, my third grade language teacher made us memorize all of the prepositions by putting them to the tune of Yankee Doodle. Catchy little song. I aced my English test on prepositions and have not thought about that song since.

Yet sixteen years later, I am able to perfectly rattle off those forty-six arbitrary words in perfect alphabetical order. That song was in my brain all this time. Untapped, unused, but unchanged. How can this be?

Remember our chat about neurons? Well, their little fingers are called dendrites. These dendrites are what reach out and make connections to other neurons. The number of dendrites per cell is plastic- meaning your neurons can grow or lose dendrites- and therefore connections- according to how much the present ones are used (do a Sodoku puzzle tonight! Grow some dendrites!). These connections are what constitute your memories. Fire one chain of them off, boom: your fifth birthday party. Fire a different combination of connections off: that Halloween you lost your wallet and walked home in the rain, maybe sort of inebriated, dressed as Chewbacca. Your recollection of your life’s experiences is a complex network of chemo-electric signals. That’s insane, right?

A study in the mid-90’s looked at memory and music. And boy, are they correlated. Text recall was significantly better when set to the tune of a song than when simply spoken. However, it was significantly worse when just one verse was sung or when plural melodies were introduced in a single song (Wallace 1994). From this, we can conclude that it’s not just rhythm that enhances our dendritic connections- it’s actual music. Be it a stupid yet catchy tune (“Call Me Maybe,” I’m looking at you and your stupid lyrics), or soul-moving sounds like Mozart’s Requiem.

It’s can be unsettling that memories of things like your first kiss or precious time with loved ones that have since died are nothing more than very specific paths of action potentials traveling from neuron to neuron in that hunk of meat we call a brain. But the fact that they are solidified by music makes it easier to stomach- at least for me. “Party in the USA” takes me right back to margaritas in my college apartment, laughing with my girlfriends so hard I couldn’t breathe. “Leave” by JoJo puts me right back in my sister’s Jetta, making late-night summer trips into Bossier City to get soft serve ice cream from the McDonald’s drive-through. I can put on Rachmoninov’s second concerto, about halfway through the first movement, and be transported back to my father’s strong hands on the steering wheel as he drove me home from my first year in college- and actually feeling the sense of content safety I felt then.

And that, to me, is simply beautiful- dendrites and action potentials included.


Wallace, Wanda T. Memory for music: Effect of melody on recall of text. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Vol. 20 (6). Nov. 1994, 1471-1485