glad all Over to remember

      The song came up unexpectedly, in the car. As usual, I didn’t want to listen to the news so I slid an old mix-tape CD into the maw of the CD player. The intro drumbeats started and I immediately recognized the song and—though I hadn’t heard or thought of it for years—knew all the lyrics. I sang along.

      The song was “Glad All Over,” by the Dave Clark Five.

      It came out in 1963. Sixty-some years later, every single lyric—granted, the song is fairly repetitive—immediately came back to me.

      Those were not the only lyrics I unexpectedly have remembered recently. When my wife and I were talking about how cold this winter has been, I noted, “coldest winter in almost 14 years,” and realized quickly that was one of the lines from “Mandolin Wind,” by Rod Stewart. I pulled it up on Spotify and instantly knew all those lyrics, too.

      For some reason a couple of weeks ago, we thought of Merrilee Rush’s “Angel of the Morning,” big hit, summer of ’68, and yeah, got every word. The Mamas and Papas’ “Creeque Alley,” from 1970, also on the mix-tape CD? Absolutely knew it by heart.  

      The obvious question is: why? Many of us we can’t remember where we left the car keys or if we turned the oven off or where are my sunglasses and what’s the name of that person we saw in the supermarket who we worked with for ten years, so why can we remember the lyrics to songs from decades ago?

      Part of it, of course, is repetition. Particularly back in the days of top-40 radio, we heard songs like “Glad All Over” over and over again and again. It’s obviously not like how we read even a favorite book or watch a favorite film.  

      With that repetition, the songs were able to imprint their lyrics, and their beats, into our brains. Repeated exposure to anything obviously increases your chances of remembering it, especially when it’s something you really care about, like a favorite song.

      But apparently there’s more to it than that, or so I found.  

      Music is fundamentally emotional. Research has shown that one of the main reasons people engage with music is because of the diversity of emotions it conveys and evokes. And a wide range of research has found that emotional stimuli are remembered better than non-emotional ones.

      Music also has a long history of being used as a mnemonic device. Before the advent of written language, music was used to orally transmit stories and information. Even today, think of how we teach children the alphabet; when we recite the letters, don’t we hear that familiar tune and rhythm in our heads?

      And once a melody is familiar, the associated lyrics are generally easier to remember than if you tried to memorize them without a tune involved. Rhyme and rhythm together help give our brain a cadence of words that are easier to remember, which is why researchers are using music to assist people with various neurodegenerative disorders—like Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis—remember verbal information.

      Music also can serve as a predictable “scaffold” for helping us remember associated lyrics. The rhythm and beat give clues to how long the next word in a sequence will be. This helps to limit the possible word choices to be recalled by signaling, for instance, say, a three-syllable word fits with a particular rhythm within the song.

      A song’s melody also can help to segment a text into meaningful chunks. This allows us to essentially remember longer segments of information than if we had to memorize every single word individually. Songs also often make use of literary devices like rhyme and alliteration, which also help us remember.

      When we have sung or heard a song many times before, it may become accessible via our implicit (non-conscious) memory. Singing the lyrics to a very well-known song is a form of procedural or motor memory, like riding a bike or swimming, even if it’s been a while since we’ve done those things. That is, we do it without thinking much about it.

      “We often don’t know that we know something until we need the information,” explains Glen Finney, a behavioral neurologist.

      And knowing that really does make me glad all over.