How are Songs able to Take You Somewhere You Weren’t Planning to Go?
When was the last time you were traveling down the road or in the store shopping for groceries and suddenly a song comes on that immediately transports you to another place? Maybe you start to remember someone you haven’t seen in 10 or 20 years. Perhaps you recalled an experience you hadn’t thought about in just as long. And before you can even identify what you’re trying to remember, some emotion or that emotion has already arrived and swept you.
I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve experienced this. It’s truly countless. It has happened so often that I thought to myself, there has to be more to it. Sure, we all have songs we like. Some make us nod our heads. Some make us sing along. Some make us get up from our chairs and head immediately to some dancefloor. On the other end of the spectrum, some make us smile and reflect on the good old days and some make us lament on lost love. Whatever you feel, there is one main theme connecting them altogether: Music has an extraordinary ability to connect us to people, to relationships, and to moments that seem to have been sitting stagnant in the back of our minds.
I’ve spent many hours trying to explain this feeling to my family and my friends to no avail. Little did I know, there was already a term for this experience – music-evoked autobiographical memory (MEAM). Autobiographical memory is a recollection of accounts of our individual experiences and knowledge we’ve picked up throughout the courses of our lives. As an extremely poignant and powerful cue, researchers have noted that music is an integral component of memory recall for all types of past experiences. It’s so powerful that when the mood is right, you don’t even have to try very hard.
That to me is a gift. If you take the human brain, for many, it’s only so long we can hold a memory. That works for us and against us. Of course, we tend to want to forget the pains caused by bad memories, but what of the good ones? Memories, even good ones, tend to fade after time. But researchers have suggested that music has the ability to connect personal recollections with emotional response. In other words, even as our good memories start to fade, music serving as a relation, can bring that memory back to you (or take you to that memory) more vividly than we realize.
Music often can serve as a trigger to remember events past, but I think it get’s even more interesting than that. Not every emotion triggered is attached to something we can identify with from direct experience. I’ve found that sometimes when a musical composition is just right, it can activate nostalgia for places we’ve never visited or for relationships we’ve never experienced. That moves beyond the limits of autobiographical memory in the strict sense, I know. Imagination and/or other emotional associations can be involved too. And that distinction raises another question: do we really have the access to all the emotional history we may carry?
Think about our memory as something we use instinctively and intentionally to retrieve things. It’s almost like opening up one of your old filing cabinets trying to find a document we put there some time ago. But with music, we don’t always need that deliberate motion of digging through the archives. Something as plain as hearing a few piano notes playing the right musical sequence can bring entire periods of our lives into our immediate focus. This is where Kind Rebirths enters.
Mindful awareness is equipped to do more for us than simply allow us to experience emotional rushes from familiar songs. We start to notice what comes to our mind, we observe the rush of feelings that complement it; and we witness just how our interpretations of these memories may have changed (or changed us) over time. For instance, songs that used to bring reminders of heartbreak now may remind us of how much we’ve grown. Songs that remind of us of past friends and the things we used to do as teens may use to introduce sadness, but now we may feel appreciation. Friends, it’s not the event that has changed, just our relationship with those memories that are different than before.
This is why music is so important to me, and I hope to share that experience with you all. Well, I cannot pass my past experiences of joy or pain directly. However, I do hope to bring you to a place that recognizes that music can not only take us back in time. Also, as one of its greatest gifts is to provide an opportunity to recognize that it doesn’t just transport and leave us in a place where we used to be, but it lets us see who we are now as we relive those memories again.
Stay mindful…
Rebirth
