You Remember Music, Not Why You Entered the Room

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1:07The last show with David Cooper. You can remember every word of a song from 25 years ago, right? But not why you just walked into your kitchen. What were you looking for? Is your brain declining or just organizing in ways that leave you standing there confused? I am here to discuss just this with Professor of Anatomy at the University of Bristol in the UK, Michelle Spear. Michelle, welcome to the show. Thank you. When I read your article on this topic, I was struck by it because I'm someone who can remember lyrics from a song many, many years ago, and I'm also the most forgetful person in the world. I don't remember who was in my house for dinner last night. I'm confident to know that that's common. How common is this that people can remember music and not other things? You know, it's incredibly common. It's something that we all do. But I think it's perhaps something that we'll worry about as well.

2:08And so that's why I particularly wanted to write about this. And instead of it being a sign of maybe something to worry about, it's actually telling us something really interesting about the way that our memory works. So it's just entirely normal and it's the brain doing its job. So how does memory work to provide this experience? Is my brain just really nostalgic? Like it loves music, but not what I'm going to the kitchen for? Like why does this happen? Why does memory function this way? So it is fair to say that the brain loves music and I'll come back to that. Just to tell you a little bit about that. But the way that memory works is memory isn't a single thing. It's not like a filing cabinet. We're not storing something away. Neither is it like a video recorder. And if I was to kind of just explain memory to you, I'd say that we need to think about it

3:09in three stages. So in the first stage, we just need to encode the information. That really means that we're sorting it out. We need to be paying attention at the time, which is another factor that comes in. And we encode it and we place, if you will, tags on it labels, attach different meanings to it. And then we store it and that's when we make connections and sometimes those neurons will strengthen over time. And then when we come to retrieve it, which is the final stage, that very much depends on the cues that are going to enable us to retrieve it. So the kind of tags that we've put in place in the first instance. So when it comes to music, there's so much within music, it's so rich. So you've got rhythm. There might be repetition in a chorus. So it might be that you've heard it so many times over, it might be that you do assign

4:15some emotion to it, you know, that the kind of song that you played when you passed your driving test, that kind of thing. So and then it's got lyrics, so there's language centers in the brain. It might be that you've danced to it, so there's movement. There's so many tags you can put to it, which means that actually there's a really good chance of encoding and then processing and then retrieving all of those lyrics. Interesting. So that's how music is especially good for that. So where I put my keys, I've just got the one tag, like it's in the bowl, but with music you got the rhythm, the key, the chord changes, the repetitive chorus, like you all this rich tapestry of things to tag it with. And so naturally it would be easier for your brain to do so. Am I understanding this right? Absolutely, that's exactly it. You just got more of a chance, essentially. And then if you are doing like things like emotion, which you can get with memory, that's even deeper encoding, so it's even more deeply embedded and a stronger memory.

5:18Tell me about this doorway effect because it almost feels supernatural. First off, what is it and then we'll chat about it a bit. So psychologists will refer to the doorway effect, which is just in walking through a doorway, you can forget things, that's it. And again, this tells us something about how the how memory works because we don't, if you think of this type of memory as being a bit like episodes, so say in a series, you're organising the experience into episodes, or if you will, chapters in a book, something like that. So the doorway, the literal doorway that you walk through is going to act as a boundary between those chapters or episodes. So when you move into a new room, the brain updates the context of what's happening and effectively closes that previous episode down. So that means actually you're in a new context and it's perfectly possible to forget what

6:22the intention of walking into the room was because that was something that you're so shaped with, with the past and the previous room. So that feeling I get when I walk around my house, I enter a new room and then I completely forgot why I'm there, that's totally normal, that wipe of the mind in that case is totally normal. I'm not losing my mind. You're not at all, it's completely normal, it's how memory is designed. There are those memories that you encode and you lay down, like the music that we were talking about. And those memories that you just need, just quickly, just transiently, a bit like when you're logging on to something and you just need to remember a kind of code, you're might say the numbers to yourself quickly and you just retain them for the time that you need to use them and then they can go again. That's the kind of thing that we're thinking of with working memory and of course you don't want to retain all of that, it hasn't got meaning, you've used it and it's served its purpose and then it can go. So that is actually that type of memory working.

7:25It's just a bit annoying when you go upstairs to fetch your charger and then you can't remember why you're there in first place and head back downstairs again. Now back to the music thing, certain songs can kind of instantly and vividly transport us back to a place being with a person a moment decades ago when I can't remember anything about decades ago. Why does it do that? Why does it, I know you mentioned all the rich tagging but there's something to me that's so unique about music that it really just helps paint a scene vividly or maybe that's just me. No, a lot of people find this and I think it's one of those actual wonderful things about music, quite often remember where you were in a songs playing, you don't tend to do that with TV or with film and that's because of some of those really, really unique tags that we were thinking about, so there is the repetition, so sometimes you remember songs and it

8:25might be a song that you weren't awfully fond of, it was just on the radio a lot and that's where the repetition comes in. But then sometimes it's one of those songs where you know, you were mb years ago, you were at a party and you were belting it out and everybody was there and it was at the moment and you had a great time. So what you then do is assign a level of emotion over that and it's a whole different system in the brain that kicks in. So we've got a lot of, you know, the brain's really well designed, but you've got a lot of things that can kick in, so the thing that kicks in when we're thinking about emotion is something called the limbic system and that really kind of helps us to respond and conditions how we respond to think these kind of emotional things. So it might be, you know, sometimes a smell reminds you of something, a sight, something like that, that's the limbic system and of course, you know, the tags that we were talking about, memory can have that emotional aspect and that's where it comes in.

9:30And there's the speech, so you remember things, so speech production, that it tags to the order to call texts and so so much of the brain and such a, really just such a diffuse area of the brain and that can respond to music. That's what makes it so different and why you, why you are remembering those lyrics, but you know, not why you put your glasses. Well, I've enjoyed the chat. You can read more about this, Michelle Spear wrote an article about this in the conversation titled Why You Can Remember Every Word of a Song From 25 Years ago, but not why you walked into the room. Michelle Spear is a professor of anatomy at the University of Bristol in the UK. Michelle, I've enjoyed the chat. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you very much. Monster Energy. Everybody knows why monster, zero ultra. That's the OG. It kicked off this whole zero sugar energy drink thing, but ultra is a whole line of

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