Nothing Sparks a Memory Like a Song

                “Nothing sparks a memory quite like a song”

-Spotify Music

On Wednesday last week, I went to hear a lady speak about her findings in her scientific research. I thought it would be cool to go hear her talk about it because it dealt with my two favorite things. Music and the Human Brain.

                This neuroscientist like to learn about the brain in a way that I never thought of before. She wanted to know if there really was some kind of correlation between music and memories. In order to find this out, she had to do some tests to see if there was a specific part of the brain was responsible for this. She found out that there was, in fact, a part of your brain that would “light up” when you would hear a song and feel an emotional tie with a memory. To come to this conclusion, she did tests on normal people with no brain damage, on people with brain damage in the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for memory, and people with brain damage in other regions of the brain, to make sure it wasn’t all brain damaged patients. In her experiment, she played music for all the patients and ask them to tell her any memory that came to mind. According to her hypothesis, she predicted that the patients with no brain damage at all would experience more, vivid memories and the patients with memories related brain damages would experience little vivid memories. When she concluded her experiment, she found that her hypothesis was correct in that patients suffering from memory related brain damages experience less vivid memories and people with brain damages elsewhere and people with no brain damage experience vivid, more emotional memories.

                I think this kind of information could be used to help students learn new topics in school. I think that would work because if they hear a song while learning something and then hear that same song again, maybe it could help them remember the idea better. This could also help patients slow the process of aging because elders could listen to a playlist made for them so they don’t forget things as easily. Lastly, knowing where all these memorable experiences are being retrieved from in the brain came help scientist find to cure people who experience brain damaging accidents. I think that would be super cool if they could find a way for elders to keep the memories they had when they were little instead of having them slowly erased from their memory.