While driving recently, a long-forgotten song came on the radio. I found myself singing along; not only did I know all the lyrics to a song I hadn’t heard in 25 years or more, but I also managed to rap along. How is it that I could give this rendition, but often cannot remember what I came into the room for?

It is tempting to treat these moments as evidence of cognitive decline. A quiet, creeping sense that something is slipping. But the contrast between flawlessly (it was) performing a decades-old song and forgetting a just-formed intention is not a sign that memory is failing. It is a demonstration of how memory works.

We tend to talk about “memory” as if it were a single thing. It isn’t.

Remembering song lyrics relies on long-term memory – networks distributed across the brain that store information consolidated over years. These include language areas in the temporal lobes, auditory cortex, motor regions involved in speech production, and emotional circuits of the brain that help tag experiences as meaningful.

Music is neurologically extravagant: it recruits multiple systems at once – rhythm, language, movement and emotion. That multiplicity strengthens encoding.

Each time........

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