How Music’s Emotional Waves Drive Memory Formation

Andy Hab
3 min readDec 7, 2023

The emotions in music help create frames that help the brain group and remember better

Music makes you smarter, they say, and playing certain types of music helps you perform better. That’s right isn’t it?

Yeah, there was this phase for playing Mozart decades ago now, after it was found to boost cognitive performance, and worried parents started playing Mozart to their babies hoping to boost their little darlings’ intelligence.

But further research showed that actually any music helps you perform better, through stimulating your mood, and the best is music you like, not a particular style.

But the research recently published looks at music’s emotional swings and how this helps memory formation.

Ok and how did they do that…and does it help memory formation…and how?

That’s a lot of questions. Let me take them one by one.

First off, the research looked at remembering neutral objects such as pictures of fruit on a computer. So not something that is related to a particular emotion such as in a film when this is designed to match a particular scene.

Sets of music were designed for the experiment to evoke different emotions, so not…

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Andy Hab
Andy Hab

Written by Andy Hab

Sharing fascinating, fun, and important knowledge on the brain and human behaviour - most days. And masters track athlete - still going strong!

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