Professor Catherine Loveday, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, took part in a TEDxLondonBusinessSchool event with a talk titled ‘Do you know why music is important to you?’.
TEDx is a programme of local, self-organised events that invites speakers to spark deep discussion and connection about their own expertise. TEDxLondonBusinessSchool is one of the premier innovation and thought-leadership events in London, which is run by the students of London Business School. Each year, the School welcomes world leading experts to share their ideas in business, technology, science and the arts.
This year’s event was streamed online on 2 and 4 February, with each talk focusing on the theme ‘Mind the Gap’, examining the gaps our society faces and the opportunities that arise. In her talk ‘Do you know why music is important to you?’ Professor Loveday discussed her research about why our musical memory seems to be so robust.
In her talk, Professor Loveday spoke about her own personal experience with vivid musical memory and nostalgia, which led to her recently published research about music and memory. Alongside researchers from City University of London, Professor Loveday analysed the music record choices of guests on the BBC radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs, which asks notable guests to share which eight music tracks they would take to a desert island. From analysing these responses, they found a consistent pattern, suggesting that music we listen to between the ages of 10 and 30 define us for the rest of our lives.
Aligning her research with the Mind the Gap theme of the event, Professor Loveday spoke about the importance of music in connecting us with ourselves, but also that it plays a fundamental role in connecting us with others. For example, in her research, she found that memories of a person are the most popular reason people chose songs on the Desert Island Discs programme. As well as connecting us with people we know, Professor Loveday said that music can connect us to people that we don’t know so well, for example in religious ceremonies or football terraces.
She also discussed a phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump, which is an increased or enhanced recollection for events that took place in adolescence or early adulthood. Talking about the reasoning for the reminiscence bump, Professor Loveday said: “The thing we focused on that seems to be particularly important is that it is a time in our life when we make a lot of decisions; decisions about who we want to be…what we believe in, who we want to spend the rest of our lives with. They are very critical decisions and they are decisions about our identity.”
Desert Island Discs presented a prime example of this in their episode with Bruce Springsteen, who chose three out of his eight songs which reminded him of his decision to become a guitarist. Professor Loveday said: “These memories that we call self-defining memories are incredibly important in terms of who we are, and we know when we see people who lose access to these memories how profound of an effect that is. So, for music to give us access back to these memories is really important.”
Professor Loveday’s take home message of the programme was that music can provide a way to connect with someone even if you never play a note: simply asking a stranger to tell you about an important song will allow you to find out something important about them and this can be a very effective way to build empathy and connection.
