Why We Remember Music and Forget Everything Else

For many people, music feels like a part of our subconscious. It’s constantly playing in the background, whether we’re at a coffee shop, in the elevator, working from home, or even just walking down the street. Every year, Spotify tells us how many minutes we’ve spent listening to music. I spent 53,402 minutes in 2021—17 hours a week—which is far more time than I’ve spent doing most other things. In 2017, Nielsen estimated that Americans spend over 32 hours a week on average listening to music. It’s no surprise that we have such a strong memory for music and can easily recall lyrics and melodies, even if we haven’t heard them in years. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In March, a new Wordle spinoff called Heardle launched. It tests musical memory by asking people to identify a song after hearing only one second of it, and for every wrong guess, extends the track by one second. I was excited to have a place to use my musical knowledge, and I’m not the only one. Millions of players have used Heardle to identify popular and nostalgic songs from different generations, from the Fugees to Spice Girls to Adele. The popularity of Heardle taps into an interesting part of human psychology: how deeply we store music in memory and how easily we can recall it. “There is an approach called the gating paradigm [which is] very similar to the Heardle app,” says Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, assistant professor of music psyc...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Psychology Source Type: news