“Music imprints itself on the brain deeper than any other human experience. Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring with it memory. Music brings back the feeling of life when nothing else can.”

 Dr. Oliver Sacks, MD, Author, Neuroscientist

 Hearing the lyrics, “If I had to choose just one day, to last my whole life through, it would surely be that Sunday, the day that I met you…”(Nat King Cole), has the ability to bring me back to days of adolescent yearnings. Teens are all about emotion and nothing stirs emotion quite like music. We were seniors in an all-girls high school, crazy about boys but lacking boyfriends. Talking about crushes consumed us and we each longed to be swept away by our one-true-love. Love was a fuzzy concept though, thought to be something like we saw in movies or felt when we listened to popular love songs. The song was the repetitive soundtrack of group sleepovers where we would sneak out to sit on a hill to look at the stars and share secrets.

Sometimes a song brings me back to a moment with a person. When I hear the Irish lullaby, "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ra,” I am back as a toddler with my nana. Recalling the Italian children’s song, “Mi Scappa La Pipi” returns me to laughing with my own young children.  And the Christmas carol, “Up on the Housetop” always reminds me of a long lost friend who played Santa one time.

Other songs transport me back to places. The country song, “I Saw His Car in Her Driveway” has me driving to Crested Butte, Colorado with my husband for a ski vacation and “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” returns me to a bus trip through Europe when I was young and single. The title song from the movie, “A Man and A Woman” brings me back to student days in Manhattan. Each time I hear “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” I remember the first time I heard it. I was in a ferry terminal and it came over the PA system. I felt I was experiencing a seminal shift in culture. The Beatles seemed that revolutionary.

Music also allows me to travel back to specific events and the emotions I felt then. Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” always makes me giggle as I remember lip-syncing it with my teacher colleagues at a school assembly. I’m not sure who laughed harder—the students or us. Hearing “The Caisson Song” reminds me of the nervousness I felt at a piano recital in elementary school.

Neuroscience explains this time-traveling through memory as the left side of the brain trying to understand why the right side of the brain reacts with pure emotion to a specific piece of music. The left side searches for a connection and puts it in context—like, “Oh yeah, I heard that in 1991 when I was with so-and-so.”

Is there an old song that triggers such vivid memories for you that it takes you on a trip back through time and space?