Hearing even a tiny fragment of a song can trigger rapid recognition in the brain, highlighting the remarkable power of musical memory.
The brain takes as little as one-tenth of a second to recognise a familiar song.
When people hear a familiar song, their pupils dilate and electrical activity in the brain spikes, signalling rapid recognition.
This process begins just 100–300 milliseconds after the song starts.
People in the study were played snippets shorter than one second of 100 different songs.
Despite the extremely short clips, their brains reacted rapidly to songs they recognised.
The finding may help to explain why dementia patients who remember little else will still respond to a familiar tune.
Professor Maria Chait, study co-author, said:
“Our results demonstrate that recognition of familiar music happens remarkably quickly.
These findings point to very fast temporal circuitry and are consistent with the deep hold that highly familiar pieces of music have on our memory.”
Burst of recognition
The study included 10 people who listened to the 100 song snippets while their pupil dilation and their brain’s electrical activity were measured.
Some of the songs were familiar to them, others were not.
The results showed that pupil dilation was the first sign of recognition, occurring within 100–300 milliseconds.
Electrical activity in the brain showed a characteristic burst of recognition around 500-800 milliseconds after the start of the song.
Professor Chait said:
“Beyond basic science, understanding how the brain recognises familiar tunes is useful for various music-based therapeutic interventions.
For instance, there is a growing interest in exploiting music to break through to dementia patients for whom memory of music appears well preserved despite an otherwise systemic failure of memory systems.
Pinpointing the neural pathway and processes which support music identification may provide a clue to understanding the basis of this phenomena.”
Related
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Jagiello et al., 2019).
