Oct 19, 2011
Creating Sticky Memories
Over dinner with a dear friend, Tanja, and her family last Sunday, she mentioned that she had recently come across a collection of her parents’ vinyl musical LPs. Listening to these old recordings, she was surprised to discover that she remembered all the lyrics to songs she hadn’t heard in decades. Tanja likely heard her parents’ musical recordings many times while she was a child. The repetition forged strong neural bonds that made these memories stick over time.
I’m a bit envious of people like Tanja. Clearly, she has a great verbal memory. Mine is poor but improving through practice.
Neuroscientific research indicates that the human brain is highly adaptable. Stress your brain to do new things, such as learning a new language, and it will soon adapt. Learning a third language will be easier than learning the second. Stressing your brain with these demands is apparently healthy.
A recent CBC news story reported that bilingualism may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
I wrote a post this week on the Absorb LMS blog about a memorization technique called spaced repetition. You can read it here. If you’re cramming for an exam, learning a new language, starting to play a musical instrument, or just looking for ways to keep your brain nimble, consider structured memorization techniques.
Song lyrics are apparently stored in your brain in a different way from prose. Likely they’re encoded together with the melody, which is why you typically have to sing to yourself to recall all the lyrics.
I suspect that other factors (your age, the setting in which you hear or sing the lyrics originally) also influence how strong the storage is.
There’s a poignant example of this in the HBO documentary The Memory Loss Tapes. A man who can’t remember for 10 minutes where his wife and daughter are taking him (a performance of a choral group he was part of) is able to shine onstage, singing with talent and gusto–and immediately after, return to his confusion about where he is and why.
Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music goes into this in entertaining (and research-based) detail.
Dave:
You would be my first choice as a someone with whom I would like to spend an evening in a local pub—Kathleen MacInnes singing in the background—to discuss these types of things.
Yes, I’ve read that song lyrics are stored differently. Because of this, I memorize them (or at least try to) both sung in my head and spoken, like poetry.
I read Daniel Levitin’s (who incidentally teaches up here at McGill) book a number of years ago. Smart guy.
Off to try to track down the HBO documentary.
Hope to meet you face-to-face some day soon. It’s a shame our conversations have only taken place on networks and blogs.