This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

According to the multiple-trace memory models, every experience is potentially encoded in memory. Not in a particular place in the brain, because the brain is not like a warehouse; rather, memories are encoded in groups of neurons that, when set to proper values and configured in a particular way, will cause a memory to be retrieved and replayed in the theater of our minds. The barrier to being able to recall everything we might want to is not that it wasn’t “stored” in memory, then; rather, the problem is finding the right cue to access the memory and properly configure our neural circuits. The more we access a memory, the more active become the retrieval and recollection circuits, and the more facile we are with the cues necessary to get at the memory. In theory, if we only had the right cues, we could access any past experience.