Recent studies have shown that music that catered to our tastes and preferences as adolescents has greater power over our emotions than music we listen to at any other point in our lives. This is because our auditory system “binds” us to the music we hear as teenagers, a connection that stays with us throughout the remainder of our life. This means that the cultural phenomenon of nostalgia has clear neurological roots—other music just doesn’t please our ears as much as the sounds heard during the development stages of adolescence.
It is obvious that listening to music can elicit powerful emotions, mixed feelings, and memories by engaging our auditory, premotor, parietal, and prefrontal cortex. PET and fMRI brain imaging techniques show that the release of chemicals that make us feel good after music-listening depends largely on our personal preference. Listening to our favourite music (versus listening to music we are impartial to) releases a greater amount of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. But how do we come to prefer certain kinds of music over others in the first place? The most rapid neurological development to our brains happens between the ages of 12 and 22. When listening to songs at that age that we like, our brains make strong neural connections to it, consequently creating strong memories about the events associated with those songs. Due to an excessive amount of pubertal growth hormones the memories are also full of heightened emotion, and those songs/events are perceived to be overly important.
The author also notes that musical preference developed in our teenage years is closely tied with our social lives. Adolescence is often a time for establishing one’s identity, and music is one way of discovering and expressing it. This, in combination with a phenomenon where autobiographical memories are disproportionately remembered for events in adolescence and early adulthood called the “reminiscence bump” (Rathbone et al. 2008; Krumhansl & Zupnick 2013), causes music that we are drawn to as teenagers to become a part of our self-image for life.
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This is an article written recently for the “Science” section of Slate.com, an online magazine also featuring stories on current affairs, business, and the arts.
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