Teo Costantini ENGL 1102-065

The beauty of the saxophone in Dave Matthews Bands #34 is magnificent in and of itself. I
have listened to the song countless times since I first noticed my CD player skipping through 22 blank
tracks between Pay for What You Get and this hidden track. However, each time I listen to it now, I
am instantly taken back to listening to it on my iPod on a flight home from Chicago after a language
competition when I was 15. I was alone on the flight, and it was very late. Leaving Chicago, all I could see
from my window was a graph of lights with millions of points plotted throughout and glowing bright.
This was not the first time I heard the song, but probably the most profound. However, why does seeing
a city lit up at night not remind me of this? Why does thinking of Chicago only remind me of the wind
and rude people? In detail, I will be investigating the connection between music and specific memories.
Everyone I talk to can name a song and a memory which they associate it with. Often, it is a
memory of where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the song, but not always.
This connection is often exploited with songs which explain a task or help to otherwise memorize a
series of information- I am sure most people still sing the ABCs when alphabetizing. The temporal
lobe is home to both the primary auditory cortex as well as the hippocampus. According to psychology
author Kendra Cherry, [the primary auditory cortex] is important for interpreting sounds and the
language we hear.
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Nearby sits the hippocampus, which Cherry describes as being why this portion of
the brain is also heavily associated with the formation of memories.
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Could this be the reason behind
these links and if this is the case, what connections are there within this lobe and why do they make
such associations?
From here, I begin to wonder if mankind can reverse engineer this process, in order to allow the
manipulation of this lobe in a way which improves long and/or short-term memory. The medical
community could produce great steps forward if we could unlock this part of the brain, at least to the
extent where it could benefit those with impaired memory caused by mental trauma, concussion,
disease, and/or age. Is such manipulation of our very own organic motherboard even possible? Has
modern science advanced enough to even begin to put these pieces together?
Even without having professionally studied memory or music, I feel that I am on to something. I
have already used music so much to improve my own memory, as well as making new concepts easier to
learn through song. When I first started learning German, I immediately started listening to German
music. This led to me sitting down and analyzing the lyrics and their grammar and vocabulary in order to
help me understand what I had already memorized purely by listening. Now, when I am writing in
German and cant remember the case that an article takes or the conjugation of a verb, I can often sing
a song to myself and remember how it works.
Ancient Mesopotamians used music to memorize everyday tasks as well as important events.
Slaves in the United States used songs as a form of code to remember an undrawn map of the
Underground Railroad before and during the U.S. Civil War. Even today, in some villages where there is
no written language, history is passed down through song. This shows that before we, as humans, were
able to put our thoughts and ideas onto paper, we could still write them on the proverbial paper of our
brains with the ink of spoken words.
How does our brain make these connections? Why has our brain developed a link between
music and memory? Is it a coincidence that music is interpreted and memories are stored in the same
region of the brain? Are humans naturally inclined to have an appreciation of music? Is there a way to
manipulate these connections within our brains? These are the questions I will investigate in my paper.