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A new study published in Human Brain Mapping has found that music which evokes nostalgia activates a unique network of brain regions tied to memory, self-reflection, and emotion. Researchers discovered that self-selected nostalgic songs triggered more brain activity than familiar or unfamiliar non-nostalgic music in both younger and older adults. Notably, older adults showed even stronger activation in key nostalgia-related areas, suggesting nostalgic music may play a special role in memory and emotional processing later in life.
This research was driven by growing interest in how music can help people with memory loss, especially those with Alzheimer’s disease or related conditions. While it’s well known that music can stir strong emotions and bring back personal memories, scientists have only recently started to explore the brain’s response to nostalgic music in detail.
The goal of the new study was to understand how nostalgia-evoking music differs from other types of music in the brain, and how these effects might vary across the lifespan. This foundational knowledge could eventually inform new therapies using music to help preserve memory and emotional well-being in aging populations.
“I grew up as an avid musician and music listener. As a teenager, I began to notice how certain songs could transport me back to moment in time, where I could truly feel how I
felt in that moment or era of my life and return to that headspace,” said study author Sarah Hennessy, a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Arizona, who conducted the study while a PhD student at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.
“I’d be listening to the Beatles White Album and I’d be back in the car with my dad, driving to school for fourth grade through the snow and sipping a hot chocolate. I began collecting these types of songs and ‘saving them for a rainy day,’ in a way, where I listened to them when I felt lonely, or simply needed to reminisce.”
“Later, various anecdotal reports began to emerge that individuals with Alzheimer’s and other dementias could still emotionally respond to personalized music, even with profound memory degradation, which I was very interested in. Unsurprisingly, this fascination continued into my research career! So my primary motivation for this project was to understand why and how we feel nostalgia associated with music, and how this manifests in the brain across adulthood, which will help us understand these processes in individuals with cognitive decline.”
For their study, the researchers recruited 57 healthy participants—29 younger adults aged 18 to 35, and 28 older adults aged 60 and above. Each participant identified six songs that personally evoked nostalgia.
“Nostalgic music is not universal,” Hennessy noted. “Every individual has a different personalized set of nostalgic songs that have meaning and memories attached to them. These songs span across every genre.”
The researchers then used a machine-learning tool to find other songs that were musically similar in tempo, key, and energy, but did not evoke nostalgia. These were used as “familiar control” songs. Additionally, the team selected unfamiliar songs that were also musically matched, ensuring that differences in brain activity could be attributed to nostalgia rather than musical features or familiarity alone.
During the main experiment, participants listened to their nostalgia-evoking songs, as well as the matched familiar and unfamiliar control songs, while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan. Each song was played for 40 seconds, and participants kept their eyes closed to focus on the music and any thoughts or feelings it evoked. Afterward, they completed tasks assessing memory and rated how nostalgic, positive, or emotionally intense the songs felt.
The brain scans revealed that nostalgic songs, more than the control songs, activated a wide array of brain regions. These included areas involved in self-reflection and memory (such as the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and hippocampus), emotional salience (like the insula and anterior cingulate cortex), and reward processing (including the ventral tegmental area and orbitofrontal cortex). These regions together form a network associated with processing autobiographical memories, regulating emotions, and feeling pleasure—all key elements of the nostalgic experience.
Interestingly, the nostalgic songs also triggered increased functional connectivity between brain regions involved in self-related processing and emotional awareness. Specifically, the posterior medial cortex showed stronger communication with the anterior insula when participants listened to nostalgic music, suggesting that nostalgia may integrate personal memories with emotional significance in a particularly powerful way.
“Despite all of the differences present in musical choice, nostalgia as evoked by music is associated with a very clear pattern in the brain across individuals and across the lifespan,” Hennessy told PsyPost. “This pattern involves parts of the brain called the default mode network and the reward network. These networks of the brain help us process information about our own life stories, and respond to things that bring us pleasure.”
Older adults not only reported feeling more positive emotions while listening to music in general, but they also showed stronger brain responses to nostalgic songs than younger adults. In particular, older participants showed greater activation in brain areas related to sound, memory, and emotional meaning, such as the temporal pole, angular gyrus, and sensory processing regions. The findings suggest that older adults may engage more deeply with nostalgic music, possibly reflecting a shift in emotional priorities with age.
“We observed that older adults actually had slightly stronger activation in these nostalgia-related regions than younger adults,” Hennessy explained. “We expected older and younger adults to have similar patterns of activation, but this finding was a bit unexpected. There are a few different explanations for this finding, but future work is needed to really parse them apart. But for now, it’s an interesting piece of information to explore in the future.”
But the study, like all research, includes some caveats.
“Our sample was from the greater Los Angeles area, so of course is not representative of all younger and older adults,” Hennessy noted. “I think there is a lot of cool work to be done exploring the role of culture in music-evoked nostalgia and autobiographical memory. Participants only listed to 40 second clips in the scanner (we hope to explore these research questions with full-length pieces in the future). However, the fact that we saw such robust effects with only 40 seconds is pretty amazing.”
Still, this research represents a significant step toward understanding the neuroscience of nostalgia and how music taps into deep emotional and autobiographical experiences. The study’s authors hope to apply these insights to future work with clinical populations, including individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
“The goal is to use this research to create, improve, and understand music-based interventions for neurodegenerative diseases,” Hennessy explained. “If we can understand how music-evoked memories and emotions can remain in individuals with dementia, we can learn how to harness music to improve quality of life for these individuals and their caregivers.”
The study, “Music-Evoked Nostalgia Activates Default Mode and Reward Networks Across the Lifespan,” was authored by Sarah Hennessy, Petr Janata, Talia Ginsberg, Jonas Kaplan, and Assal Habibi.
