There’s a reason you gravitate toward the music you loved during your middle school, high school and college years, even with all of the great, new music that’s out there.
The music you listened to as you were growing up and developing your identity actually impacts your brain differently than music you hear now, research shows.
“It’s really just the intersection of brain science and our personal stories,” said Danica Shinn, a social worker and the operations director at Marble Wellness in Missouri. “The adolescent brain, when it’s developing, really locks in not just music, but new experiences and different things from that time.”
If you find yourself playing songs that were in frequent rotation on a mixtape or your iPod shuffle decades ago, here’s why:
Your love of music from your teenage years has to do with the ‘reminiscence bump.’
“There is this thing that we call the ‘reminiscence bump’ in memory research,” said Sarah Hennessy, a research scientist at the University of Southern California.
“For a long time, we’ve known that if you get to be in your 60s, 70s, and you ask people to recall memories of their life, there’s this big bump in the quality of and the number of details that exist within memories from your teenage years and early adolescence — age 9 to 29,” Hennessy said.
Maybe you can specifically remember a mundane moment on the bus in middle school but can’t remember much about that job you had in your early 40s. This is because of the reminiscence bump, which also plays a role in music choices.
“More recently, in the past 20 years or so, people have been realizing that this does apply to music, listening preferences and memories that are evoked by music, too,” Hennessy added.
The fact that music from your adolescence feels important and memorable comes from the idea that memory, in general, has a “bump” at that age period, she said. This is true no matter the kind of music you were listening to during your adolescence, whether it was Frank Sinatra, the Jackson 5, Backstreet Boys or Hilary Duff.
It’s thought that the reminiscence bump exists for a few reasons. “We think that it has to do with brain development, identity development and novelty that occurs in that age period,” Hennessy explained.
In your adolescence and young adulthood, you experience lots of firsts — first relationships, first apartments, first breakups, first jobs — “and that novelty creates a very strong emotional response, coupled with the fact that your brain is developing, and emotion and memory go really well together,” Hennessy said.
“And then when you add music on top of that, which is already a quite emotional stimulus, people use music to regulate their emotions, particularly in adolescence, and people attribute their musical taste to their identity, especially when we’re forming [our identity],” she continued.
This all comes together to make the music we listened to during our adolescence and young adulthood feel emotionally charged and attached to critical identity-related memories. “In the grand scheme of your lifetime memories, that period of time stands out more than early childhood, or mid-adulthood, for example,” she added.
The music you listened to when you were a teenager lights up the reward center in your brain.
Music we love from our youth lights up our brain’s memory and reward centers.
A viral video on social media is calling the happy experience of listening to throwback music “neural nostalgia,” which is not an official term that’s recognized by the music therapy world, said Katherine Goforth Elverd, the director of music therapy at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
But, it does correlate with what’s known as “preferred music,” noted Elverd.
“So within our practice as board-certified music therapists, we gravitate toward the preferred music of individuals — that’s what makes music therapy work,” Elverd said.
Preferred music is the music that folks listen to (or compose or recreate) that serve as a motivator for non-musical outcomes, Elverd said. “And we tend to draw upon the music from our youth.”
Listening to music you loved in adolescence lights up the memory center and reward centers in your brain, Shinn explained. It also triggers the release of feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. This is all why music from our youth gives us the “warm-fuzzies,” said Elverd, and why it elicits such positive emotions.
Hennessy, along with a team, also conducted research about the impact of music on the brain and music-evoked nostalgia.
In Hennessy’s study, the memory and reward areas of the brain only activated when someone was listening to their preferred nostalgic song. If a similar-sounding song came on, their brain didn’t light up the same way, she said.
“When we look at the brain areas, we know that the effect that we’re seeing isn’t because of the music features. It has nothing to do with how the music was written, or the lyrics, or the instruments, or anything. It’s really due to the feeling that it gives you, which is important, because everyone’s nostalgic songs were so different,” Hennessy said.
Listening to your favorite songs from your teenage years can be a good motivator and mood-booster, but can bring on sad feelings, too.
If you are someone who commonly turns to your favorite songs from high school or the music you listened to at college parties, there’s no need to stop. It can be a motivator to help you get things done around the house or head outside for your evening walk, or it can be a way to feel a little lighter and less stressed during a period of burnout or heaviness, according to Shinn.
“Being able to find those moments of peace, levity, lightness, however and wherever we can, is so important, and that might be as easy as popping something on in the car during the commute,” Shinn said.
Music is also pretty accessible, which makes it a great mental health tool, Shinn added. “For the most part, people can find what they need through music, and it’s quick — two to three minutes — for a really nice reset as well.”
The only potential pitfall is if the nostalgia goes too far and you end up listening to songs that reinforce sadness, Shinn said.
While it’s true that music can bring up happy memories of teenage days, it can also bring up negative emotions, Elverd said, “like if you associate a song with the death of a grandparent or a family member.”
“There’s very much a physiological effect that music has on the brain,” said Elverd.
Research shows that when folks listen to nostalgic music, the emotional response isn’t all good.
“People, when they’re listening to nostalgic music, feel positive with like a little bit of negativity. So it’s a slightly mixed feeling,” said Hennessy, before adding that this may be because a certain song brings you back to happier times that don’t exist now or memories with a friend who you lost touch with.
If you notice that you’re feeling more down than up when listening to nostalgic music, it could be worth talking to a professional such as a board-certified music therapist, according to Elverd. They can help you determine why you’re looking to experience neural nostalgia and make sure you’re doing it healthily.
“Especially if there’s someone that’s living with past trauma in their life or current trauma, and looking for this concept to help them cope through what they’re experiencing,” Elverd said.
