On a melodic memory

Scent may have the closest tie to memory because of the logistics – the olfactory bulb is a part of the brain’s limbic system; they have the advantage of proximity – but speaking from personal experience, I have found my memories bound more faithfully to sound than any other sensory modality.

At times while chipping away at my daily assignments, my iTunes player shuffles and slyly pulls out a song that has been buried under gigabyte after gigabyte of music collected over the years. A distinct trail of melody, a certain maneuvering of fingers across the strings of guitar to produce a particularly telling riff, might draw forth memories of my freshman year in high school at precisely 6:45 am when my bus would pull up to the corner, and like an ominous yellow portal, beckon me within. Upon hearing this song five years later, I still recall looking out the window at the array of houses, twins, triplets, and quadruplets, all virtually the same, and the feel of the crackly brown upholstery of the seats beneath me. All the while, my playlist circled through and I’d rest my eyes for moments and look at the back of the bus driver and anticipate the sun the break the chilly sky and the rest of the day to fall into place. Although I sit in my dormitory at a utterly different segment of my life staring at abstract concepts lectured to me hours before, songs on that playlist still are able to awaken dusty pathways where impulses once traversed habitually. In turn, they roused visual memories to awaken, fibers containing tactile information that they had secretly stored without my conscious permission reignite and I feel the tips of my fingers remembering.

Other playlists jog other memories – songs that I associate with writing my term paper senior year, songs that relate to driving around, cradled in the warmth of the sun in the summer of 2007, songs connected with my trip to Costa Rica, songs attributed to my first boyfriend – and the list grows.

Sometimes I organize my iTunes library by ‘Date Added’ and steadily scroll through its entirety, amusing myself with some of the older songs that I would be embarrassed to have others see. But I find fine lines that divide my life into chapters, the music I listen to now is even different from the music I had indulged in my previous year in college. My current playlist consists of a lot of Yeasayer, Ratatat, and Beach House, their patterns of air compressions and decompressions causing movements in my brain to thread them to the image of this room, this blue plastic chair that it came furnished with, the brisk and bold coldness of our Michigan weather. The beat, the bass, all intermingled, consolidated in the hippocampus (which, incidentally has the shape in cross section of a sea horse) and dispersed to the various cortexes of the brain to one day, perhaps be fished out by the whimsical shuffle feature on my music player.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.