Why does music make us feel the way it does?

Why does music make us wanna move?

And why do songs sometimes gets stuck in our heads?

James May, from the YouTube channel Head Squeeze,

thanks for the music. Pleasure. Why can music bring back memories?

That is a very good question actually. I've often wondered why it has this power

actually to unlock a completely dormant memory, something that's gone as far as you

know

and then it chooses, usually a pop tune from say ten or twenty years ago,

bang, there you are, wherever you were at the time. Sometimes it's positive,

sometimes it's negative,

but what is nostalgia?

Well, it turns out that nostalgia and

feeling emotions because of music and dancing

and getting songs stuck in your head

all orbit around a common theme.

Your identity. Because, really, physically speaking,

who are you? Every single day

you are losing atoms and gaining new ones from what you eat and drink.

It takes about five years to replace every atom in your body,

which means that the matter that we call you today

was not part of you five years ago. If we speed the process up we start to see

that your physical body,

really all of us, every human on earth,

is just a temporary group of atoms and molecules that, nonetheless,

keep the same name the whole time. Now this is what we think of when we think

of our bodies,

but to an alien, who could track individual atoms,

and only saw maybe a few frames per decade, you would appear to be what you really

are. A bunch of incoming atoms,

making your shape and then leaving.

So, what's consistent here? What are you?

Nostalgia, fondly remembering the past, what you

used to do and who used to be might simply be a way for your brain

to answer that question or at least cool down the anxieties it causes.

Because even at a macroscopic scale, you are always changing.

You have different friends, different behaviors, different moods, different

tastes

all the time. If you grew up

in the 80s, and by that I mean 1680s,

it would have been possible to have been nostalgic for a time

before the word nostalgia existed.

That's because in 1688 Johannes Hofer coined the term

by combining the Greek words for returning home

and pain. Nostalgia was originally seen as a quite serious medical condition,

affecting soldiers who missed home so much

that they broke down and were unable to fulfil their duties.

The only cure, as Hofer saw it, was to

be sent home, to your home,

because nostalgia is really all about you.

Your memories, your past, who you used to be

and consequently who you are now, which makes nostalgia an often healthy way to

answer the question

'who am I?' Well, you're a person who remembers specific events in the past.

You existed in the past and are a continuous

being. A popular theory argues that the psychological effects of nostalgia,

connecting with your younger self and building a continuous

identity, are advantageous, and so we're naturally selected to be

rewarding experiences. You change

your habits, your friends, your job, you learn things and forget things,

but nostalgia allows you to connect all of those

events, which is especially helpful during times of major life

transitions, like

entering adulthood or aging, when study showed that nostalgia

is at its strongest. But if tucking in and lining up all of your life experiences into

a continuous story

is so advantageous, why don't we feel nostalgic for

everything in the past? Why don't you feel nostalgia for

what happened one minute ago? Why don't you feel nostalgic for the way this

video began? Well, the lifespan retrieval curve

might offer some clues. It's an average plot of distinct autobiographical memories

and it reveals what is called the reminiscence

bump. A time between 15 and 30 years of the age, where more memories are encoded.

This time in your life, both while you are living it and later,

is thought to be important because it's so linked to the formation of our

self-identities. Memories formed during that bump

tend to be the ones we are most nostalgic for

and because we want our continuous identities to be positive,

we tend to be nostalgic for good memories,

not bad ones. Individually and collectively we also tend to be

nostalgic and reminisce

on things as if they were better than at the time they

really were. Twenty years after leaving his hometown

Abraham Lincoln returned to it and looking upon it remembering it

nostalgically,

he wrote these lines of poetry. "My childhood's home

I see again and saddened with the view

and still as memory crowds my brain, there's pleasure

in it too." Abraham Lincoln might seem like

a quite ancient person, someone from way back in history.

But here's some perspective. On February 9,

1956, a date within the lives of some of our parents and many of our grandparents,

this old man appeared on the television show

"I've got a secret." What made him so special?

Well, he was Samuel J. Seymour,

an eyewitness. Goodnight, Mr. Seymour. How old are you by the way, Sir?

Ninety six. Ninety six years old.

He was allive and in attendance at Ford's Theatre

on the very day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

And he was alive recently enough to have appeared on national

television. Music doesn't have to bring up old memories or

make you feel nostalgia in order to help you build an identity.

Lawrence Parsons in a great interview discusses the fact that babies

from about six months to one-year clearly respond to all kinds of

different

rhythms and chords when only a single note or beat

is out of place. But after one year

babies tend to only respond to rhythms and chords

from their own culture, from the world around them.

This makes sense when you consider just how important it is for our brains to

not only construct a continuous

individual identity, but a continuous identity within the groups

that we belong. We don't always get along with or

understand other people, but when two people listen to and respond to

music, their feelings and emotions can become more similar than if they were to

merely sit

in silence or use words with no rhythm.

So, although we are still not exactly sure why music makes us wanna move,

the desire you have, the impulse you have to tap your foot or

bob your head or, if confident enough, dance

when you hear a rhythm might have less to do with the behavior you have learned

and more to do with your internal desire

to fit in. And as a consequence of our impressive ability to communicate and be

social

it even happens when you are alone or when you want to

dance as if no one is watching. Speaking of dance,

William Michael Brown motion captured good and bad dancers so he could render

them into digital stick figures

and remove all clues as to their fitness or looks or health.

Now, figures with symmetric movement, what we might call

good dancing, were consistently rated as more attractive

and more desirable as mates.

But this may have less to do with music being some special human behavior

and more to do with communication in general.

Sharing a musical experience with someone else might just be an extreme

form

of the communication skills that were naturally selected into us,

so that we could understand each other, understand a motion from tone of voice

and listen. Sweet, fatty foods

taste good because they signal our brain that they are full of energy.

Energy that we need to survive. This is why

cheesecake tastes so incredible. But it doesn't mean that

cheesecake is necessary for survival.

Music might be the same way. A happy accident of

the communication skills we developed but fundamentally

an unnecessary one or, as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker famously called it,

acoustic cheesecake. If not properly chewed

a bite of cheesecake can get lodged in your throat.

But a short repetitive song can get lodged

in your brain. It's called an ear worm.

At best it means that the song is catchy. At worst

it means replaying over and

over and over again the same song in your head

until you are annoyed. According to research by James Kellaris,

nearly all of us experience ear worms.

Men and women experience them equally as often but for reasons we don't quite

understand yet

ear worms tend to last longer for and be more irritating

to women. Repetitive rhythms make a song

easier to reproduce in our heads and unusual time signatures

or unresolved or incomplete musical ideas.

bother us. Perhaps because we strive to communicate completely and clearly

so we fixate on these little snippets of songs, replaying them over and over again

in our heads, hoping to resolve them,

which, of course, they don't, meaning that they are quite literally a

cognitive itch. An itch that that just gets worse

by being scratched. Our inability to suppress

a simple thought, like the famous "quick, whatever you do,

don't think of a pink elephant" or

the game or a song stuck in your head

might be explained by ironic process theory.

The idea that in our brains there are two different processes going on.

One, which consciously controls what we think about

and the other unconsciously monitoring

what we are thinking about. They share an equal amount of cognitive effort and

they're always in balance and so more effort put into monitoring

what you're thinking about means that there's less left to actually control

what you think about.

Spending that cognitive effort on some other task that uses working memory like

Sudoku or

anagrams can often help get an ear worm out of your head.

You can always just replace the ear worm with another one, using a service like

Unhear it[.com]. Ear worms are annoying,

but music has the power to conjure up all kinds of other emotions

when we hear it. A major reason for this is the fact that, like our sense of smell,

music is initially processed in the same regions of the brain that process

memories and emotion, like the amygdala.

So, maybe those are

answers - memories. You might not have the same friends and job and house and

atoms throughout your life, but you do have the same memories,

so are you just your memories?

Well, unfortunately, that idea is a little troublesome, because

memory loss doesn't necessarily make you a brand new different person

and there's also the slight problem of false

memories. These studies always freak me out.

Researchers bring in participants and show them photographs from their

childhood

and ask him to tell a story about what happened in the photo,

except one of the photos has been photoshopped.

It didn't really happen. But instead of noticing

this fake image, people tend to just

make up a story and remember it as if it really happened.

Couple weeks ago I went with Jake Chudnow, who does the music here on Vsauce

to the Royal Observatory

in Greenwich. We saw the seventh-largest telescope

on earth and while there, this song

was playing. It's called "Longplayer."

Composed by Jem Finer, Longplayer is constructed by combining different

recordings of singing bells.

They're combined in different ways, so as to never repeat

for 1,000 years.

Longplayer began in 1999 and it will not finish,

the song will not be over for 1,000 years.

Literally, billions of humans will be born

and die before Longplayer is

finished playing. The sound waves,

the compression waves that send Longplayer into your

ear aren't that much unlike you,

your waves of atoms, temporarily organizing atoms or molecules but not

really causing any one atom or molecule to stay along with you

for the entire journey. Just as the ocean

waves and bells ring, as Alan Watts said, the

earth peoples. In a way, you are a slow compression wave moving through

Earth's matter. But what does your waves sound like?

Does it make people wanna dance? It probably won't