Cover by Julia Malnak

Soundtrack of the Mind

By Cynthia Kumaran

Think about this—every year around Christmas time you find that one playlist in your Spotify that brings back memories of holidays in your childhood home. Headphones in, you dance around the room wondering how your mood shifted so suddenly. The rush of nostalgia that you get from listening to those songs is unmatched every time.  

The effect that the sense of sound has on our memory and emotions is extremely powerful and complex. Maybe there’s a song you can’t listen to without crying because it reminds you of your first heartbreak. Perhaps the sound of birds chirping brings you dread simply because it reminds you of your morning iPhone alarm. The sounds of your life are so closely connected with how you feel and what you remember that it’s almost alarming. So why does this happen?  

As it turns out, music and other auditory signals directly trigger the limbic system, specifically the hippocampus and amygdala. These parts of the brain are largely responsible for your memories and feelings. They condition our brains to associate certain sounds as bad or good emotions. If the sound is positively-linked, dopamine (our body’s “feel-good chemical”) will be released (CBC 2016). If the sound is negative on the other hand, your amygdala (which is responsible for fear responses) could turn the sound into a signal of distress for your brain (Kraus and Canlon, 2012). For example, hearing a loved one cry can trigger tears in your own eyes as well—your sense of sound is just that influential. 

“The most important things cannot be spoken...That’s why there’s music” (Wearing, 2005, p. 33). This is what Clive Wearing said to his wife Deborah Wearing when they first met in London. At the time, Clive was a well-known music conductor and Deborah had just joined the choir in the same music company. Mr. Wearing was more correct than he would ever know when he spoke those words. Neuroscientists have discovered that music is processed in around 12 parts of the brain because of its complexity. Speech, feeling, critical thinking, and general audio transduction are all involved in listening to music, so the job isn’t localized to one specific place in your brain (University of Central Florida, 2017). For this reason, music is so heavily studied in the neuroscience field. The Wearing couple’s love story began through music, and prevailed through the same shared interest when disaster struck for the two.  

When Clive Wearing was just 45 years old, he rapidly fell into an extreme anterograde and retrograde amnesia caused by an unfortunate case of herpes encephalitis, a sexually transmitted neurological disease that causes the damaging inflammation of the brain (Lakhan, 2021). Having both anterograde and retrograde amnesia meant that Clive was not able to remember things from before he first became ill and also could not make new memories after the infection.  The illness reduced his memory to a few seconds at a time, making it incredibly difficult for his wife and others to communicate with him. Remarkably however, Deborah Wearing witnessed her husband do something miraculous when visiting him in the hospital one day. She heard Clive sing a song with her—a song they both knew from her choir days. She exclaimed, “I started to sing one of the lines, he picked up the tenor line and sang with me. A bar or so in, I suddenly realized what was happening. He could still read music. He was singing” (Wearing, 2005, p. 105). How can someone so far removed from their own memories keep such a detailed love and talent for music over anything else?  

Many neurodegenerative diseases, including Clive’s herpes encephalitis, prove that music memory may remain largely unaffected by degeneration. Although neuroscience experts are still confirming this hypothesis, it remains true that even with damage to certain parts of the brain primarily associated with sound, musical talents can be preserved. Specifically, when the bilateral medial temporal lobe is damaged from a neurodegenerative disease (the part of your brain responsible for consolidating long-term memory and processing sound), the skills of remembering how to read and perform music remain intact. Researchers figure that those skills could be largely attached to the parts of your brain that deal with motor skills and general perception instead, away from the areas of damage (Cavaco et al., 2012). This idea is based on the two different types of memory: episodic and procedural. While episodic memory is the more traditional “narrative” memory, it is intertwined with procedural memory, which is more primitive and relies largely on motor functioning. Neuroscientists believe that the retainment of musical talents in those with damage to certain parts of their brain that affect episodic memory are kept safe through procedural memory—which is why Clive was able to remember how to play instruments and conduct music. This type of memory has its center in brain structures like the basal ganglia and cerebellum, which are found towards the stem of the brain and are not largely affected by most neurodegenerative diseases (Vennard, 2011). This convenient pathway for sound makes hearing quite the efficient sense for people from all walks of life, like Clive Wearing.   

So, how can we use this incredible association to help those with failing memories? People with Alzheimer's, general amnesia, and other deteriorative causes to the brain can benefit from something called music therapy. Music therapy involves encouraging a patient to dance and sing along with music that they have a strong attachment to. For some, this could be a wedding song. For others, it could be the lullaby they sang to their children years ago. Deborah Wearing would sing with her husband very often to keep him happy, and she found that it was the best thing they could do to keep their relationship alive through all of the changes. The auditory and physical stimulation that this therapy provides is perfect to relieve anxiety and stress (Mayo Clinic, 2021).  

Music therapy was an idea tossed around by physicians, researchers for many decades due to skepticism, and only started showing up in university curricula in the mid-1940s as an official form of therapy (American Music Therapy Association, 2021). No one would have guessed the effectiveness of something as simple as music for healing. Over the years, music therapy has developed into a staple in psychiatric medicine. According to a study done on Dementia patients in 2020, music therapy presented a significant increase in cognitive functioning for the patients, even if it was short-lived. They concluded that overall, the treatment improved the patients’ quality of life to a large extent (Moreno-Morales, et al, 2020). Patients of any age and status can benefit from this therapy, especially those like Clive who suffer from deterioration of the brain, because it allows them to recall positive times that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.  

So next time you listen to that group playlist that your friend group made together or cry over a movie soundtrack, remember to be thankful for your sense of hearing. Without it, you may not be able to remember the certain memories and feelings that mean a whole lot to you.