The Neuroscience of How Music Evokes Emotions & Memories 🧠
The Neuroscience of How Music Evokes Emotions & Memories 🧠
Exploring How Music and Memory Are Connected in the Brain (7min Read).
TL;DR:
Music powerfully evokes memories and emotions, often acting like a "time machine" that transports us back to specific moments in our lives.
The brain’s reward system, led by dopamine, plays a central role in strengthening memories tied to music, making them last longer.
Other neurotransmitters like serotonin (mood regulation), norepinephrine (arousal and attention), and glutamate (memory formation) also enhance music-related memories.
The mesolimbic-hippocampal loop connects pleasure and memory systems, reinforcing vivid, emotionally charged memories associated with music.
Predictive processing helps the brain anticipate music patterns, further strengthening memory by rewarding accurate predictions with dopamine.
Music creates a rich, multi-sensory experience that taps into the deepest memory systems of the brain, making it easier to recall significant events tied to songs.
Music & Memories
Have you ever heard a song and suddenly found yourself transported back to a particular moment in time?
Maybe it was a summer road trip, a wedding, or a difficult phase in your life.
For me it’s Bon Jovi that my mom always used to play, or Classic Rock that my dad would play in the car on the way to basketball games.
The soundtrack to the movie Glory Road is another music score that brings up fond memories for me!
The experience feels almost magical, as if the music acts as a time machine, bringing not only memories but also emotions flooding back.
This effect isn’t just in your imagination—it's rooted deeply in how our brains process and store music-related memories and emotions.
Today, at the request of a medical student who reads the blog, I’d like to do a deep dive into what’s going on in the brain during moments like this!
Luckily for us, the connection between music and memory is complex but well-mapped by neuroscientific research.
Multiple areas of the brain, neural networks & neurotransmitters collaborate to process music, emotional responses, and memories.
And it all starts with everyone’s favorite neurochemical, dopamine.
Let’s dive in!
The Brain’s Reward System: How Music Enhances Memory
The most important thing to understand about listening to music, is that it’s not just your ears that are engaged—your entire brain comes alive in a symphony of activity!
The primary star in this process is dopamine, the "feel-good" neurotransmitter that’s released in the brain’s reward centers, such as the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area (VTA).
Dopamine doesn’t just make you enjoy the music though, it strengthens the encoding of memories tied to that music, making them last long after the song ends.
However, dopamine doesn’t work alone.
When music stirs strong emotions, serotonin kicks in, helping regulate your mood and influencing how the emotional weight of the music is encoded.
This is why music that resonates with you on an emotional level tends to stay in your memory more vividly.
Serotonin’s role in emotional processing complements dopamine’s effect on reward, making the memory both emotionally rich and pleasurable.
Additionally, norepinephrine—a neurotransmitter linked to arousal and attention—plays a role when music emotionally excites or moves you.
This boost in attention helps sharpen your focus, increasing the likelihood that you’ll remember the details surrounding the musical experience, like the setting or your emotional state at the time.
Norepinephrine is also responsible for the "flashbulb memory" effect, where moments tied to intense emotional responses (such as hearing a song at a major life event) become etched in your memory with crystal clarity.
The Mesolimbic-Hippocampal Loop & Memories
Ok, that’s some of the neurochemicals, now, let’s introduce a major player in this process: the mesolimbic-hippocampal loop.
Sounds scary, I know, but let’s break it down.
This pathway connects the brain’s reward centers with the hippocampus, which is responsible for creating long-term memories.
When you hear music you love, this loop is activated, reinforcing the details of your experience—like where you were or who you were with.
It’s as if music hits the save button on your memory, locking in the details around it.
But there’s more: listening to pleasurable music doesn’t just strengthen memories of the music itself.
Thanks to something called the penumbra effect, the dopamine-rich environment created by the music also makes your brain better at encoding other details.
It’s why you might vividly remember the weather, the scent of your surroundings, or even small conversations that happened while the song played in the background.
Think of this loop as a bridge between pleasure and memory, making musical memories more detailed, and emotionally charged.
Memory HQ: The Hippocampus
The key is in the hippocampus, the brain's memory headquarters.
When music activates the dopamine system, it doesn’t just make you feel good—it tells your hippocampus, “Hey, this is important. Let’s remember this!”
The hippocampus responds by consolidating the memory, making it easier to recall in the future.
A fascinating aspect of this loop is its ability to enhance recollection.
It doesn’t just make you remember that you heard a particular song; it helps you vividly recall the emotional experience tied to it.
It’s why you might not only remember dancing at a wedding when a certain song plays but also the excitement, joy, or nostalgia you felt in that moment.
This is also where glutamate—the brain’s main excitatory neurotransmitter—steps in.
Glutamate strengthens connections between neurons in the hippocampus through a process called synaptic plasticity, which is essential for forming and storing long-term memories.
This means that dopamine signals the importance of the memory, while glutamate ensures the brain can keep it.
How Your Brain Uses Music to Predict Memories
Alright, now that we’ve gotten very specific, let’s zoom out a bit.
One of my favorite neuroscience concepts to talk about is how the brain structures our reality by predicting it, not just perceiving it.
Meaning, the brain doesn’t just passively listen to music—it’s constantly trying to anticipate what comes next.
This is called predictive processing, and it’s key to how music helps create memories.
Imagine listening to a song you’ve heard dozens of times before. Your brain already knows the patterns—the rhythm, the melody, even the chord changes.
Your brain is using these patterns, or reference frames, to predict what will happen next in the song.
Every time your brain gets it right, dopamine is released as a reward.
This dopamine surge not only makes you feel good but also strengthens the memory of the song and everything happening while you listen as we talked about above!
The brain’s predictions go beyond just the sounds, though. They connect with the emotions and context tied to the music.
So, if you first hear a song during a special event, your brain will predict those same emotional cues every time you hear the song again.
These predictive patterns are stored in things called “cortical columns” throughout your neocortex & hippocampus, but we don’t have time to dive into those today!
The point is that your brain is predicting the memories and emotions you “should be” having when a certain song comes on.
It’s kind of like how you know the next number in this sequence, “1-2-3-”… is 4.
You might have even said it in your head before reading the 4 I wrote.
The pattern for a certain song is much more complex than the pattern for, “1-2-3-”, but the same basic mechanism holds true.
Certain songs cause your brain to predict certain memories and emotions based on the predictive patterns it’s stored in the past, just like your brain predicted the number 4 before reading it a second ago.
This is why hearing a particular song can take you right back to a moment years ago, making the memory feel as fresh as if it happened yesterday.
Wild, right?!
Why Music Has Such a Strong Impact on Memory
The interaction between music and memory isn’t just a nice bonus—it’s a fundamental part of how the brain works.
Music creates a dopamine-rich environment that makes it easier to encode and consolidate memories, especially the ones that are personally or emotionally significant.
In essence, music is a multi-sensory, emotionally rich experience that taps into the deepest memory systems of the brain.
Wanna a pro tip? Take a moment to savor them when they come up, this will deepen the positive memories and emotions you associate with the song in the future.
After all, these are the memories that tell the story of our lives—the ones tied to specific people, times, places, and emotions.
Cherish them.
And until next time… Live Heroically 🧠
Supporting Research:
Brown, S., Martinez, M. J., & Parsons, L. M. (2004). Passive music listening spontaneously engages limbic and paralimbic systems. NeuroReport, 15(13), 2033-2037. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15486477/
Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257-262. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726
Janata, P. (2009). The neural architecture of music-evoked autobiographical memories. Cerebral Cortex, 19(11), 2579-2594. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhp008
Zatorre, R. J., & Salimpoor, V. N. (2013). From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(Supplement_2), 10430-10437. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301228110
Hawkins, J. (2004). On intelligence. Times Books.
Hawkins, J. (2021). A thousand brains: A new theory of intelligence. Basic Books.