‘Reminiscence bump’
‘We’ve looked at everyone as a group and then we’ve broken people down into different age groups,’ explains Dr Morrison. ‘The most popular age bracket is 55-65 and that’s because of what we know about autobiographical memory. There is what we call a ‘reminiscence bump’, which is a peak in the memory from the teenage years. This is the period in your life in which you are forming a sense of self. And for people who have Beatles-related memories, the majority of memories are of events that have occurred from the teenage years.’ Younger respondents had an equally emotional response, conjuring up vivid personal memories.

She Loves You
The study revealed a high level of detail in the memory retrieval of the respondents, not normally revealed by more conventional approaches. ‘You get the sense of people being transported back,’ explains Morrison, ‘and they have an extremely vivid account of what went on. They’ll say “I only have to think of the song She Loves You and I remember that night in autumn 1963 in the Palace ballroom, and I remember what I was wearing, what the weather was like and what my friend said to me”. There’s a huge amount of data that people uncover which you typically don’t get if you say “think about a holiday”.’

Ultimately the project opens up possibilities for using music to engage with people who may have problems with memory. ‘You can extend this to think of people with memory problems,’ says Morrison, ‘and think of using music as a tool to enhance their memory abilities. What we’d like to pursue in the future is to do it in a more experimental kind of way, using controls to look at music in comparison to other types of stimuli.’