The Musical Reminiscence Bump

When people my age were kids, there were only two ways to hear your favorite songs. One was to buy the record and play it over and over again. The other was to wait until the DJ played the record on your favorite radio station. In today’s world, you and I get to listen to our favorite songs from our own adolescence on demand, and it usually makes us smile as we think back. The findings of a new study explain why you and I love to find and stream the music from our teenage years. It appears that there is what is called a musical reminiscence bump that leads people to disproportionately recall memories from when they were ten to thirty years old. And, because we experience more unique self-definition experiences during this period of life, the music we listened to becomes closely entangled with those memories. What this means is that the music we listened to during our younger years sticks with us for life. Parents, introduce your kids to good music as a way of making lifetime memories.