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

by Daniel J. Levitin

The record-keeping account follows an old idea of my favorite researchers, the Gestalt psychologists, who said that every experience leaves a trace or residue in the brain. Experiences are stored as traces, they said, that are reactivated when we retrieve the episodes from memory. A great deal of experimental evidence supports this theory. Roger Shepard showed people hundreds of photographs for a few seconds each. A week later, he brought the subjects back into the laboratory and showed them pairs of photographs that they had seen before, along with some new ones that they hadn’t. In many cases, the “new” photos had only subtle differences from the old, such as the angle of the sail on a sailboat, or the size of a tree in the background. Subjects were able to remember which ones they had seen a week earlier with astonishing accuracy.