Everyone’s got that one song, haven’t they? (Or perhaps it’s more than one, depending on how many traumatic experiences are lurking in your past.) It acts as the musical equivalent of a defibrillator – as if a device carrying an electric charge had been stuck straight into your heart and then dialled up to max power. You only need hear the opening notes for roiling waves of emotion to crash over you with increasing force.
There’s a lag time between thoughts and feelings as your brain scrambles to catch up; while those neurons are still conscientiously flicking through your internal filing system to locate the precise memory associated with the sound, elsewhere in your body a short-circuit switch has been flipped. You’re trembling and aching and – geez, surely not... crying?! – without quite knowing why.
Then, at last, you have it – the flashback that joins the dots. You are not “crazy” for suddenly breaking down in the middle of Boots. No, you’ve simply been triggered by the harmless four-chord melody currently playing over the speaker system, because this was the song. The one that belonged to you and someone else, once upon a time. Without even registering what’s happening, you succumb to the overwhelming impulse to press the skip button, change the radio station, or, indeed, hotfoot it out of Boots faster than you can hum Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply”. It’s a Pavlovian response, hardwired to sidestep the inevitable onslaught of grief.
But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to avoid the music that takes us back to our darkest times. So say scientists, who posit that we can reclaim music that’s bound up with bad memories by “actively engaging” with it, according to a report in The Guardian.
Emotions play a key role in long-lasting memories, and music can evoke strong emotions – put these two elements together, therefore, and “it is likely that music can enhance the memory related to an event”, says Ilja Salakka, a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki’s Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain. “This can also work in reverse: an event itself may be emotional, and strengthen the memory of a situation that involves music.”
Dr Stephanie Leal, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California specialising in the neurobiological mechanisms underlying memory processing, has found in her research that the type of emotional response we have “can really dictate what we’re holding on to in our memories”.
For example, music with positive associations is linked to more general memories; music that prompts negative feelings is attached to memories relating to specific events.
It makes sense, then, that we don’t particularly like listening to songs that send us hurtling back through time, forcing us to relive the exact moments that hurt us most with unwanted clarity. It’s powerful stuff, after all – 15 years after the fact, I only have to hear the tinkling harp of a particular Florence and the Machine song to be instantly transported back to my first proper heartbreak, the memory almost as high-definition as the original experience when it’s amplified by a musical resonator.
However, simply cutting certain music out of our lives completely won’t necessarily help us to heal from that past pain, whereas reframing it – and reclaiming it – could actually help us to move on. Sure, if a song comes with an irredeemably bad emotional connection, it might be something you’ll struggle to get over. But one method is to embrace it, not run from it, so that a song becomes linked with positive feelings; by “repeating it with new events that do make you happy”, says Leal, there’s a strong possibility that the music “overpowers and kind of reconnects your brain, and rewires it to this new association”.
This approach – intentionally seeking out songs we associate with previous anguish and trying to rewrite the narrative – is also endorsed by Renee Timmers, a professor in psychology of music at the University of Sheffield. “Rather than seeing the music as something that is there, you can’t do anything with it, and you are the victim of it, you can actually actively engage,” she says, advising that one could sing along and even switch up the melody or harmonise, so that the music “becomes the active thing that you’re engaging with, rather than the memory”.
The sting of those original feelings was first dulled, then numbed, then neutralised
It’s worth a shot, surely, if only because the soundtracks to our sadness are frequently songs we used to adore. It’s rare that you pick a potential first dance number that you weren’t keen on to begin with, earmark something as “our song” that you secretly hate, or say your first “I love you”s while something genuinely awful blares out in the background.
I recently reclaimed a previously loved album that I’d listened to while falling for someone who, as it turned out, hadn’t been falling for me. I’d spent years dodging those songs, afraid to stir up old feelings, but when a track played at random on Spotify I resisted the usual urge to fast-forward. Headphones on, I opted to go back to the start and listen, intentionally and attentively, to the entire record. I stomped to the beach, a place that unfailingly makes me happy, and made a point of really noticing how handsome the scene was: dazzling shards of sun slipping between cartoonish clouds, adding a touch of drama as they caught the churning waves of a turbulent sea.
When I got to the end, I played the whole thing again. And again. And again. I let the emotions come, but I also let them go; that music didn’t need to remain surgically attached to the ghosts of longing and rejection. The sting of those original feelings was first dulled, then numbed, then neutralised. Over the following months, any negative associations became almost entirely replaced by fresh sonic ties as I carefully layered positive memories on top, one after the other. There is nothing painful lurking in those blameless bars any more.
Yes, music is powerful stuff. But we are powerful, too: powerful enough to stop swerving our suffering, shake off that Pavlovian response, and even teach an old dog new tricks.
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