Most people are familiar with the phenomenon of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs), even if we wouldn't all use that term in everyday conversation. Tunes and songs become automatically associated with certain events in our past, bringing memories flooding back when we hear them.
MEAMs have been widely documented in the healthy population, but not in people with acquired brain injuries. Not until, that is, research was published just last month in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. The study by scientists in Australia and France investigated the power of music to elicit memories, compared with a verbal method known as the Autobiographical Memory
Interview (AMI).
Five patients with severe ABI participated, along with five healthy volunteers as a control (comparison) group. All of the brain injured participants showed significant impairments in standard memory tests. The participants listened to 50 hit songs that were released from 1960 to 2010 while completing a questionnaire designed to assess their familiarity and liking for each song and whether they evoked a memory.
Amazingly, despite the patients' impairments, the frequency of MEAMs was similar for both patients and controls. One patient even experienced memories associated with 74% of the songs. The memories elicited tended to be of people or a life period and were typically positive and vivid.
This is the first study to demonstrate intact MEAMs in people with severe ABI. The results are potentially very exciting for memory rehabilitation, suggesting that music is an effective stimulus for eliciting autobiographical memories, some of which may have been long forgotten. Larger scale clinical research is needed in order to investigate this further.
Reference
Baird, A. & Samson. S. (2014) Music evoked autobiographical memory after severe acquired brain injury: Preliminary findings from a case series. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 24 (1), 125-143.
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