Did your ex permanently ruin a song for you? Blame your brain
You're sitting on the freeway, minding your own business, when a familiar song starts to play. Maybe you don't even realize it at first. It takes a few seconds to register what you're hearing. Then, suddenly, you're overwhelmed, feelings stirring up that you thought were firmly in your emotional rearview mirror.
For Valentine's Day, we asked our readers: What song did an ex ruin for you? In other words, what's a song you can't hear without thinking of someone from your past? (Read on to see some of the best responses and listen to our Spotify playlist.)
Songs have the power to bring us back to other times and places. To understand why, you need to know a bit about what music does to your brain chemistry. A good person to ask is Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and former record producer who wrote the book "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession."
We form memories when circuits activate in our brain. When we recall those memories, some of those circuits reactivate, "putting you back in literally the same electrochemical state you were in" at that time, Levitin said. In any song, "there's melody, and rhythm, there's the sound of the instruments … it's a very rich multi-parametric stimulus," Levitin said. "Any one of those elements could trigger a memory, and the total of the elements creates a powerful trigger."
One of the readers who responded with their own breakup story said any time they heard the opening chords of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" by the Postal Service, it reflexively brought tears to their eyes. Another reader said hearing Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" or Adele's "Someone Like You" instantly reminded them of not only the stress of the breakup's aftermath, but the feeling of their heart racing and the smell of the inside of the car they drove when they used to hear those songs on the radio.
That's a totally normal response, Levitin said: "We are multimodal creatures. We don't just see things. We see and hear and smell and touch and feel." Our experiences are linked to different senses, and by extension, so are our memories.
"Somebody That I Used to Know" came up multiple times in entries from readers. There's no such thing as a song having intrinsic musical "breakup energy," Levitin said, but certain things about them can make them more likely to trigger our emotions. The song's unusual instrumental arrangement, hard-hitting hook and haunting lyrics made it a hit — and a breakup anthem. (François Tétaz, who mixed the song for Gotye, said he was inspired by Levitin's book.)
The song was inescapable by summer 2012. You heard "Somebody That I Used to Know" on the radio, in playlists, at restaurants, in the doctor's office, in the elevator. When songs become background music like that, Levitin said, they become associated in your hippocampus — the memory structure of the brain — with that particular period of time.
The neuroscientist made a musical prediction: Anyone who goes through a breakup in early 2019 will have a similar association with "Thank U, Next."
We asked you, our readers, to tell us what song makes you feel bittersweet. Here's what you told us. Enjoy all the songs here on our Spotify playlist.