LIGHTNING

Streaks of lightning flash and fade in about 30 milliseconds, but it feels longer when you watch a storm. Memories ignite thoughts in brain exactly the same way. I get a jolt, sometimes randomly out of nowhere, and then there is a memory, vivid as a bolt of lightning in my mind’s eye. At times, the memory just appears, but more often that not, something triggers it. For me, it happens when I’m playing or listening to music. I’m transported to another time and/or place in my life. It’s powerful stuff.

Author Tiffany Jenkins writes: “Music has been an important mnemonic device for thousands of years. Epic stories like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were passed down verbally using poetic devices. Before the narratives could be written down, they were chanted or sung. Oral tradition depended on memory.” (bbc.com). Hmmm….makes me think of church, chanting, and also memorizing my ABC’s as a little kid. I dug deeper to find this: The hippocampus and the frontal cortex are two large areas in the brain associated with memory and they take in a great deal of information every minute. Retrieving it is not always easy. It doesn’t simply come when you ask it to. Music helps because it provides a rhythm and rhyme and sometimes alliteration which helps to unlock that information with cues. It is the structure of the song that helps us to remember it, as well as the melody and the images the words provoke. Tiffany Jenkins again. The lightning strike I received from this passage has to do with my middle and high school study habits. If I had science or history facts to learn for an exam, I would go over my written notes and make up silly little tunes in my head to store the information. I thought everyone did this. During the test, I would sit quietly at my desk, pencil bopping away while I regurgitated the skeletal system, some famous history dates, or vocabulary words that I “NEEDED TO KNOW” but rarely use now, unless I have a myriad of uses for said word. MUSIC always helped me learn stuff, but memories of my digestive system ditty don’t evoke any meaningful memories. Why? Possibly because there is more than one KIND of memory…

There are different kinds of memory, including explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is a purposeful retrieval of the past, often posed by questions like: where did I go on that trip? Who was I travelling with? Implicit memory is unconscious. It’s just sitting in there and can/will be triggered by all kinds of things: smell, taste, sight, and, well, MUSIC. The Google machine tells me that implicit memory can also be conditioned, for example such tasks as driving a car, walking, or riding a bike. You don’t consciously think about how to drive after you’ve been doing it awhile, you just go. Unless you are about to go over a sweet jump or a ravine, there usually isn’t an emotional memory attached to this stuff. Enter the music part.

Memories stimulated by music often come from certain times in our lives. The time we spend between the ages of 10 and 30 have been called the “reminiscence bump.” Music from the reminiscence bump time are usually more associated with memories than any other time in your life. Music preference is also formed around the middle teenage years and scientists currently think that is because we are experiencing so many wonderful things for the first time. Can you call up the song that was on when you had your first meaningful kiss? How about some music from the first live concert that you attended? I’ll bet you can smell the room whether it was a club, arena, or someone’s back yard. One of the first songs you cranked in your car when you could actually drive by yourself? Of course you know what it is and you may have tortured your children in a different car years later while cranking the song again. Good for you….fly that freak flag. Remember being nervous at the school dance, just waiting for that slow song to come on? Did you have the guts to find the girl or boy in the crowd and do the awkward shuffle left to right with room for the Holy Ghost? You bet you did. You’re humming the song right now. You might even have a playlist somewhere simply titled “life”, or “the good ole days.”

I would love for you to share some of the music that makes a memory flash like lightning in the summer sky. What have you got? This is cooler than seeing your yearly wrap-up on Spotify…

Stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned.