Neuroscientists discover music’s hidden power to reshape memory

A neuroimaging study examining episodic memory found that individuals exposed to music during memory recollection were more likely to incorporate emotions associated with the music into their memories. One day later, these memories exhibited a stronger emotional tone than the original recollections. The study was published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience.

Music is a powerful tool for emotional expression, allowing individuals to convey feelings that may be difficult to articulate through words. It is used therapeutically in hospitals and mental health clinics to reduce anxiety and promote relaxation. In educational settings, music can aid memory retention and learning, especially when used to teach language, mathematics, or historical concepts.

Socially, music fosters a sense of community, bringing people together through shared cultural experiences such as concerts, religious ceremonies, and national anthems. Athletes and exercisers often use music to enhance performance and maintain motivation, as certain tempos can regulate heart rate and energy levels. In marketing, music is strategically employed to evoke specific emotions, influencing consumer behavior and brand perception. Music is also integral to rituals and traditions, marking significant life events such as weddings, funerals, and holidays, thereby reinforcing cultural identity and continuity.

Study author Yiren Ren and her colleagues sought to explore whether music played during memory recall could introduce false emotional elements into previously neutral memories. In other words, they wanted to examine whether listening to music while recalling memories could alter the emotional tone of those memories.

Participants were 44 healthy young adults recruited from the Georgia Tech School of Psychology subject pool. The average age was approximately 20 years, and the sample included 20 men.

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Participants completed an experimental task in which they memorized and recalled several short fictional stories written to resemble autobiographical episodic memories. Episodic memories refer to personal recollections of specific events, including contextual details like time, place, and emotion. The stories were written to be as emotionally neutral as possible so that any emotional changes during recall could be attributed to the experimental manipulation. In total, 15 neutral stories were used in the main task. An additional five stories were written to be emotionally positive or negative and were included to disguise the study’s primary focus.

The experiment was conducted over three consecutive days. On Day 1, participants read and listened to recordings of the 20 stories (15 neutral, 5 emotional). Each story was presented twice. Participants then typed out the stories as they imagined them, using as much detail as possible. They also completed standardized assessments of mental imagery ability (Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire) and mood (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule).

On Day 2, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while completing a word selection task designed to prompt recall of the previously studied stories. Each trial displayed 10 words on the screen. Four were key words taken directly from one of the original stories, and six were emotionally valenced lure words—three positive and three negative—that were semantically related to the story but did not appear in the original version. Participants were asked to recall the story associated with the keywords and to select the words that best fit their recollection. Each story was randomly assigned to one of three within-subject conditions: background music with positive emotional valence, background music with negative emotional valence, or silence.

On Day 3, participants completed two memory tests focused on the neutral stories. In one test, participants were presented with words and asked whether each one had appeared in the original story. The word list included both the original keywords and the emotional lures from Day 2. The goal was to assess whether music-induced emotional context during Day 2 recollection would bias participants to falsely remember emotional lures as part of the original story.

The results showed that participants exposed to music during Day 2 recollection were more likely to incorporate emotionally congruent lures into their memories. On Day 3, when recalling the stories, they were more likely to report emotional content that matched the valence of the music they had heard during Day 2. In other words, positive music increased the likelihood of recalling stories with added positive elements, and negative music increased the likelihood of negative elaborations.

In addition to these behavioral findings, the fMRI results revealed that recalling stories with music led to altered patterns of brain activity compared to recalling stories in silence. Specifically, music was associated with increased activity and functional connectivity in regions including the amygdala, frontal cortex, and visual areas. These brain regions are known to be involved in emotion processing, memory, and imagery.

“Our data suggest that these effects manifest through reconsolidation mechanisms and neurally may be intimately linked to amygdala and medial temporal lobe function, as well as diffuse differences in engagement of networks associated with imagery, perspective taking, attention, and control,” the study authors concluded

The study sheds light on the effects of music on memories. However, study authors report that participants were generally highly accurate in their recognitions of words. This may have produced a ceiling effect, limiting the magnitude of the observed effects.

The paper, “Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: an fMRI study,” was authored by Yiren Ren, Sophia Kaltsouni Mehdizadeh, Grace Leslie, and Thackery Brown.