Music Can Sharpen or Blur Memories, Depending on Emotional Response

People’s emotional reactions to music can affect whether they recall the big picture versus detailed bits of what’s happening around them.

iStock/Aja Koska

Music accompanies important moments of our lives — guiding a couple’s first dance, uniting thousands of strangers at a concert, and motivating a student through finals. But a recent study published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests the way music alters our emotions in these moments affects how they are remembered.

The researchers asked 130 undergraduate students from Rice University to memorize a set of random images. Then, they had some students listen to classical music, some listen to neutral sounds like a fireplace crackling, and others sit in silence for 10 minutes before testing their memory. 

Surprisingly, the music listeners didn’t do any better on the memory tests than the participants who listened to neutral sounds or silence. But they experienced the greatest changes in emotional arousal, or “the intensity of your feelings,” said Stephanie Leal, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of the study. 

It was the participants’ level of emotional arousal — not the music itself — that influenced how the images were remembered. 

Music’s Emotional Extremes Blur the Details

Participants who experienced high emotional arousal — a motivated or invigorated feeling, or low emotional arousal — such as boredom or fatigue, did better remembering the gist of the images but worse remembering the details. They would remember, for example, there was a picnic basket displayed but forget the color of the blanket underneath it. 

Those occupying the middle zone of these extremes — moderate emotional arousal — were better at remembering the details.

This is in line with an established principle in psychology known as Yerkes-Dodson law, which shows cognitive performance peaks at moderate arousal and tends to suffer at emotional lows and highs.

Music did not improve memory across the board because every participant responded differently to the sounds they heard. Grace Leslie, a neuroscientist from the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, said that previously, “we thought music may have this general effect of giving children an IQ boost or enhancing memory.” But “it’s really about how music modulates emotion and in particular, arousal. And it doesn’t do that in the same way for every person.”

In this case, music modulated emotions by strengthening or weakening their intensity, which impacted what students remembered about the images.

Emotions Tell the Brain What to Remember

For all the brain’s amazing abilities, it has limited storage space, and emotions tell it which aspects of an event should be saved as memories, and which are insignificant enough to forget.

“There’s this kind of continuous evaluation of what events would be important to retain,” said Leslie.

Highly emotional scenarios trigger the release of stress hormones like norepinephrine and cortisol, creating a sense of alertness in the body and brain. This same experience can happen when we listen to music. As these stress hormones act on the amygdala, two almond-shaped nodes in the center of the brain, they tell the memory processing center, the hippocampus, “This is important! Remember it!”

“Certain parts of the hippocampus can become more active when capturing the gist of an experience, while other parts may be more active when recalling the details,” said Leal.

So, whether it’s a life-threatening situation or a joyfully ecstatic one, the brain focuses on the big picture to ensure it remembers the key takeaways, while letting the minor details fall by the wayside.

Post-Concert Amnesia, Trance States, and Music Therapy

An extreme example of this alertness overload took place during Taylor Swift’s 2023 “The Eras Tour.” Some attendees were unable to recall the details of one of the most exciting events of their lives, a phenomenon dubbed “post-concert amnesia.” One Swiftie told Time magazine it felt like “an out-of-body experience, as though it didn’t really happen to me.”

And in some situations, inducing states of poor or distorted memory through emotional intensity may be the point. Leslie noted in the book Deep Listeners, author Judith Becker describes musical rituals across the world, from the Gnawa tradition in Northern Africa to Evangelical Christian ceremonies in the U.S., in which music’s emotional intensity induces trance-like states for spiritual purposes

“These states are so high arousal that there’s a dissociation that may happen,” said Leslie, noting music’s ability to take people to the “extreme ends” of arousal where detailed memory can start to fade

In these situations and in the study, not everyone responded to music the same way, which provides clues for the practical applications — whether for personalizing music therapy for patients with dementia or depression, or for creating the perfect study playlist.

About the Author

Dina Radtke

Dina Radtke is the Media Associate & Science Writer for the Society for Neuroscience. Previously, she was a researcher for Media Matters for America where she analyzed media coverage and fact-checked misinformation. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Language & Literature from the University of Colorado Boulder.