Music and Memory Make Believe: How Soundscapes Hijack Our Emotional Recall
Friday, May 16, 2025
Ever listen to a song and suddenly remember a moment that didn’t quite happen that way?
Maybe your break-up feels more tragic with Adele in the background—or your childhood picnic seems oddly cheerful, thanks to the Bee Gees.
According to new research published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, there may be a neuroscientific reason for this. Music, it turns out, doesn’t just accompany our memories—it can reshape them.
Let’s walk through the study that reveals just how sneaky music can be in our memory reconsolidation process—and why this matters for therapists, educators, marketers, and basically anyone with a Spotify account and a human brain.
Memory Is Not a Filing Cabinet—It's a DJ Booth
This study, led by Yiren Ren and colleagues at Georgia Tech, explored a compelling question: Can playing music while recalling a memory change the emotional tone of that memory?
Apparently, yes it can.
Forty-four college-aged adults were asked to memorize neutral short stories crafted to resemble personal, autobiographical events.
These stories were stripped of emotional cues to serve as a clean baseline. Over the course of three days, participants read, recalled, and re-remembered these stories—sometimes with music playing, sometimes not.
On Day 2, during memory recall inside an fMRI scanner, researchers played either emotionally positive or negativemusic, or nothing at all.
On Day 3, participants were tested to see how much of the original story they remembered, and how much emotional tone had been “added” during that music-assisted memory jog.
The twist? Participants often “remembered” emotional words and details that had never appeared in the original stories—especially when music had been playing.
The Amygdala's Greatest Hits: What the Brain Scans Showed
The fMRI scans weren’t just for show. They revealed that music changed how the brain processed and recalled memories:
Amygdala activation increased, indicating stronger emotional encoding.
Frontal cortex engagement suggested active reinterpretation or elaboration.
Visual and imagery networks lit up more during musical recall, supporting the idea that participants weren't just remembering—they were reimagining.
In short, the emotional tone of music seems to act like a filter—or perhaps a highlighter—altering how a memory gets rewritten in our minds.
This process is known as reconsolidation, and it’s how the brain updates stored information each time we retrieve it.
Therapeutic Implications: Memory as a Mutable Canvas
This isn’t just fascinating—it’s also clinically relevant.
Memory reconsolidation is a mechanism leveraged in trauma therapy, particularly EMDR and other somatic techniques. Knowing that music can affect emotional reconsolidation raises both opportunities and ethical questions.
For trauma recovery, could calming music help soften a traumatic memory's intensity during recall?
For romantic nostalgia, are we accidentally over-sentimentalizing an ex because of the Coldplay soundtrack?
For family therapy, might music-based memory recall be used to open emotional dialogues across generations?
Therapists should be aware that memory is more malleable than clients often believe—and music may be one of the stealthiest editors in the process.
The Ethics of Emotionally Engineered Recall
Of course, if music can change our memory, what does that say about its use in marketing, politics, or even therapy sessions? What happens when you deliberately pair emotional music with memory work?
We already see music used to prime consumer behavior.
Retail stores play upbeat or nostalgic tunes to soften decision-making. Political rallies orchestrate playlists designed to reinforce collective identity.
Now we know this goes deeper—music doesn’t just influence how we feel, but also what we think we remember.
That’s a powerful tool. Maybe too powerful to ignore.
Caution: Ceiling Effects and Human Accuracy
Interestingly, despite these findings, the researchers also noted a “ceiling effect.”
That is, participants were overall pretty accurate in their memory tests, meaning the effect size of musical influence might have been larger had the original memories been weaker or more ambiguous.
This opens a future research question: Would music have a greater emotional editing power on older, fuzzier, or more emotionally labile memories?
Practical Takeaways
For Therapists: Consider the emotional context in which clients recall memories—especially when music is involved. It might not just be background noise.
For Couples: That “song that reminds you of us” might be less about the moment and more about the mood.
For Educators: Music paired with neutral or dull content could change how students emotionally relate to the material.
For Marketers: You already knew this. Now you have neuroscience to back it up.
Closing Note: When Music Lies, Beautifully
So the next time you tear up during a commercial featuring puppies, sunsets, and swelling strings—remember: music is not just a mood enhancer.
It’s also a memory editor, sneaking into the editing bay of your brain and punching up the script with a violin solo.
And frankly, we love it for that. Even if it means your actual high school dance was more awkward than magical.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Ren, Y., Kaltsouni Mehdizadeh, S., Leslie, G., & Brown, T. (2024). Affective music during episodic memory recollection modulates subsequent false emotional memory traces: An fMRI study. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-024-01112-9
Marks, D. F. (1973). Visual imagery differences in the recall of pictures. British Journal of Psychology, 64(1), 17–24.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070.