hey Vsauce Michael here music why does
music make us feel the way it does
why does music make us wanna move and
why does songs sometimes get stuck in
our heads James May from the YouTube
channel head squeezed thanks for the
music pleasure
why can music bring back memories well
it's 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 a choose it's usually
a pop tune from say 10 or 20 years ago
bang there you are wherever you were at
the terror you are 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 you 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 the 1680s it would have been
possible to have been nostalgic for a
time before the word nostalgia existed
that's because in 1688 Johannes Hopper
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
fulfill their duties the only cure as
hopper 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 and
often healthy way to answer the question
Who am I well you are 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
studies show that nostalgia is at its
strongest
but if tucking in and line
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 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 20 years after leaving his
hometown Abraham Lincoln returned to it
and looking upon it remembering it
nostalgic Lee he wrote these lines of
poetry my childhoods home I see again
and saddened with the view and still as
memory crowds my brain there's pleasure
in it to Abraham Lincoln might seem like
a quite ancient person someone from way
back in history but here's some
perspective on February 9th 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 how old are you by the way
sir
96 96 years old
he was alive 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 to use words with no
rhythm so although we are still not
exactly sure why music makes us want to
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
a 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 emotion
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 form 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 Keller Asst nearly all
of us experienced 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 just gets
worse by being scratched our inability
to suppress a simple thought like the
famous
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
pseudo coup or anagrams can often help
get an inner worm out of your head you
can always just replace the ear worm
with another one using a service like
unhear it 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 our 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 them 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 Judd
know who does the music here on vsauce2
the Royal Observatory in Greenwich
we saw the seventh largest telescope on
earth and while there this song was
playing it's called long player composed
by gem finer long player is constructed
by combining different recordings of
singing bowls they're combined in
different ways so as to never repeat for
1000 years long player began in 1999 and
it will not finish the song will not be
over for 1000 years literally billions
of humans will be born and die before
long player is finished playing the
sound waves the compression waves that
send long player 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 is your wave
sound like does it make people want to
dance
it probably won't echo around for
centuries after you're gone but maybe
while you are here you can get stuck in
the head of some other temporary wave
and ear worm that they like and don't
want to get rid of it would be a nice
type of wave to be but can't music make
you smarter and can I play an instrument
well to find out follow James and I over
to the YouTube channel head squeeze
where we take a look at those questions
and as always thanks for watching
[Music]
seriously follow us over yes later
screams right now there's also a link
I'll put in the description so it's like
a piece of cake guys come on
well we'll be over there waiting he's
over there I'm over there I'm with him
here and he's with me over there we went
you