Music and memory

Time for a literary confession (of a sort opposite that of David Lodge's Humiliation): I couldn't, or didn't, stop at one Sarah Dessen novel. When I found out, last weekend, that the local library had her 2006 book Just Listen in stock, well, that was me thumbing the pages and then following the travails of the ostracized teen model Annabel Greene.

But all in the name of longterm research, folks, I promise! Curious about how a parent should, or should not, handle a teenaged daughter's apparent eating disorder? Wondering how to interest a daughter in college, or in the creative arts? And why, really, are silent, intense boys so damned attractive? It's called Just Listen, and it's at your local library.

For this blogger/parent, however, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel was its focus on music. The title's a double entendre: it points to the need for supportive friends and family, but it also refers to the eclectic, open-minded musical interests of Annabel's eventual partner. And, as she grows to learn the Boy Behind the Earbuds, Annabel learns a few things about music, as well. Such as (page 96): "There's the fact that music is a total constant... Because a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person."

Amen to that. We've all had the experience: you walk into a completely generic space - an office lobby, or a Starbucks, or an elevator - and you hear a melody, and suddenly you're more or less right back where you were when you first heard it. Examples? When I hear Cheap Trick's The Flame, I'm in the Food Lion across I-95, mopping the aisles as we close the store. Guns n' Roses' November Rain will always take me to a grayish coffee bar in Brno, in the Czech Republic, where the owner turned the stereo system up by about 150% when the tune came on. And so on.

Is the link between music and memory, though, entirely personal, and merely anecdotal? Nope; as you might have guessed, there are lab-coated researchers working on the issue at this very moment. And in some cases, interesting findings have already been published. For instance, David Rubin of Duke University found that undergrads could remember only 32 words of the national anthem when asked to write them down without singing. When the instrumental music was played before he made his request, however, they then produced an average of 52 words. Melody can act, he concluded, as a constraint against forgetting.

Which is why, perhaps, it just feels right to sing little ditties to Cleo as we careen along the little dirt road near our house. My ear's made through and through of tin, and my voice simply can't carry a tune, but it tries, it tries, knowing that babies may remember birdies all the better since they sing.