Why we remain attached to the music of our youth
Northeastern research argues that the social rewards when listening and experiencing music in our younger days helps ‘encode’ it onto our memories.
LONDON — Musicians love to sing about teenagers. The Who, Katy Perry, My Chemical Romance all broached the fear and wonder of adolescence.
But why is it that the music of our youth embeds itself onto our memories like no other?
Researchers at Northeastern University think there is a psychological reason at play. It lies in what is referred to as the “musical reminiscence bump.”
During adolescence, teens morph into more social beings and start to move from a family setting to wanting to be surrounded and well regarded by their peers, the researchers set out.
Discovery of new music, according to four Northeastern researchers who penned a paper together, is what can help establish these new social bonds. Music offers the chance of “social rewards” by bonding with others over shared musical tastes or joint musical experience, the academics have argued. This, in turn, imprints the music from that period deep into our memories.
Psyche Loui, associate professor of creativity and creative practice in the Department of Music, said music is able to “tap into your reward system” and that this is then “linked to learning and memory.”
“We know that the music that you encode for the first time in adolescence is especially memorable and meaningful, and that’s been found in many life stages,” said Loui, one of the co-authors.
“What the paper established was that there are some part components of the reward system that become especially sensitive to social rewards in adolescence, and so things that you do with your friends become even more important,” Loui said.
Researchers have found that there is a “unique need for social input in adolescence,” added Loui. The paper, published by Frontiers in Psychology, highlights that teenage years are a time when people become “pro-social” and lean into making connections outside the family home.
The authors’ position is that the development of musical tastes works in tandem with this move toward “pro-social behavior.” They write: “We argue that greater sensitivity to the intrinsic and social rewards of music listening may motivate adolescents to share music with others, thus facilitating greater social bonds and prosocial behavior between those who share music with one another.”
Juliet Davidow, assistant professor in psychology and fellow co-author, said pro-social behavior can involve engaging in what she calls “positive risk taking” where young people might learn an instrument, join a band or become part of a new group.
This then plays into the concept of socially rewarding acts. Davidow said the brain’s reward function “is a very salient evolutionary signal of something that is worth repeating that you have just done.”
In the instance of listening to music socially or bonding over music, the reward of enjoying the music is tied up in also spending time with friends. She said it is possible that these rewarding behaviors coming together makes these memories even more tangible in older life.
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“It’s as if [the memory] is saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is hitting across the board,’” said Davidow. “This becomes something that we really need to remember because it’s not just doing one of those things that the brain cares about, it’s doing all of them.”
Nicholas Kathios, a fifth-year psychology Ph.D. student working in the Music, Imaging and Neural Dynamics lab on Northeastern’s Boston campus, was one of the instigators of the research.
Kathios initially considered becoming a professional French horn player before gravitating toward a career in research after becoming fascinated with why musical memory from adolescence is so powerful.
Both he and Loui, a violin player, have played music in care homes to elderly people, including some who suffer from Alzheimer’s and other types of memory loss. They saw firsthand how music from care home residents’ youth came back to them much more readily than music from later in their life.
“In adolescence, they might have experienced that heightened reward in response to music, which might incidentally modulate the episodic memories around them,” said Kathios. “That sort of explains that durability.”
Kathios worked alongside Rishitha Kudaravalli, a now-graduated psychology student who was the paper’s fourth author, as they looked to tie the idea together of “socially modulated reward” being a prevalent feature of why the music of adolescence sticks with people throughout their life.
Empirical studies have shown, said Kathios, that older adults were able to recall the most spontaneous memories in response to music “from their mid to late adolescence,” a period between ages 13 to 17.
Kathios explained that there are different arguments for why music from our adolescence remains favorable to adults in their later years. Some have argued that the music enjoyed during this time period is linked with having so many first-time experiences, from attending your first concert, to first loves, to starting school or college. Those vivid debut experiences make that music strongly bonded to the memories.
Others suggest musical tastes are closely intertwined with personal identity as people grow up and become independent of their parents and other caregivers. The constant self-definning of who we are means the memory of that music remains highly sustained.
For Kathios, those arguments are “definitely not mutually exclusive” and in fact link into what the paper is arguing about the rewarding nature of music during adolescence.
“What we try to portray in the paper,” he continued, “is that this idea of identity formation in the social aspect might actually make the experience of music more rewarding, which might then also play into this enhanced ability to consolidate memories during adolescence via this reward modular related experience.”
