#35: What If Music Is Your Brain's Favorite Time Machine?

☀️ When a song takes you home

A few nights ago, I heard a song I hadn't listened to in years. Within seconds, I was 18 again, having that exact feeling of restless possibility.

Not a memory of the feeling, but the feeling itself.

Because music doesn't just remind us of the past. It transports us there, rewriting time and collapsing years into a three-minute track. A single song can bring back emotions we thought we'd filed away, people we haven't thought about in a decade, versions of ourselves we barely recognize anymore.

Neuroscience has a say in this (so no, it’s not just the good old nostalgia).

Our brains are hardwired to bind music to memory in ways that are far more powerful than almost any other experience. The songs we heard between ages 12 and 22 (our "reminiscence bump" years) become permanently encoded into our neural pathways, having a say in the process of shaping who we are.

This week's edition is about that strange, beautiful power music has over our minds. It's about why certain songs feel like coming home, how creativity hides in the space between your worst ideas and your best, and what happens when even the charts can't tell the difference between human soul and algorithmic simulation.

📖 3 Articles to Spark Your Curiosity

1. Musical Nostalgia: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Song Preference
   Why songs from your teenage years hit differently than anything you discover now. The "reminiscence bump" explained: how music from ages 12-22 becomes a neurological wormhole back to your youth.
   → Read on Slate
   

2. Why Your Best Ideas Come After Your Worst
   Your first idea is rarely your best. This article explores the neuroscience behind persistence and its connection to us and the process of coming up with original ideas. Staying in the problem space longer than feels comfortable is where creativity lives.
   → Read on Big Think
   

3. How Music Resonates in the Brain
   Music activates nearly every part of your brain simultaneously: the temporal lobe, the limbic system, motor cortex. This piece looks at why music is such a powerful tool for memory, emotion, and healing.
   → Read on Harvard Medicine Magazine

🗞️ 3 Headlines Worth Exploring

1. Jack Dorsey Funds diVine, a Vine Reboot That Includes Vine's Video Archive
   Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is backing a Vine reboot that bans AI entirely. diVine resurrects over 100,000 archived six-second videos, but only if they're verifiably human-made.
   → Read on TechCrunch
   

2. Latin Grammys Winners 2025: Bad Bunny Takes Home Album of the Year
   Bad Bunny finally conquered the Latin Grammys' most coveted category with Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a deeply personal album rooted in Puerto Rican culture and memory.
   → Read on Variety
   

3. AI-Generated Country Song Tops Billboard Chart
   “Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust (an entirely AI-generated artist) hit #1 on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart. A recent study found 97% of people can't distinguish AI music from human-made tracks.
   → Read on The Guardian

☀️ 3 Actions to Step Out of Your Comfort Zone

1. Curate a "Time Machine" Playlist
   Pick five songs from your teenage years (tracks you haven't listened to in ages). Play them in order and pay attention not just to the memories they trigger, but to how you feel in your body when you hear them.
   

2. Push Past Your First Three Ideas
   The next time you're stuck on a problem, force yourself to come up with at least seven possible solutions before choosing one. Your brain's first instinct is to reach for the familiar. The good stuff lives past idea #3.
   

3. Listen to Music Like You're Hearing It for the First Time
   Choose one song you love and listen to it with your full attention: no multitasking, no scrolling. Close your eyes and notice the layers, the choices, and the space between the notes.

⚡ 6 Quick Resources

🧠 To check: Music Preferences and Your Personality
What does your taste in music reveal about who you are? Research linking pop lovers to extroversion, indie fans to creativity, and rock enthusiasts to gentleness.
→ Read on Verywell Mind

🎵 To play: Tone Guesser
Test your ear with this interactive quiz. Can you identify whether pitches are rising or falling? This short and interactive quiz is a playful peek into how your brain processes sound.
→ Play on The Music Lab

🗺️ To plan: Music Landmarks: Your Travel Bucket List
From Prince's Paisley Park to Abbey Road, these iconic music landmarks turn geography into melody.
→ Explore on Billboard

🎻 To learn: Why Should You Listen to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"?
This interactive TED-Ed lesson unpacks one of the most recognizable pieces of early 18th-century music. It’s time for a short lesson!
→ Watch on TED-Ed

🕰️ To watch: 40,000 Years of Music Explained in 8 Minutes
From hunter-gatherers with portable instruments to Beethoven's symphonies heard twice in a lifetime, this video explains how humans and music evolved together.
→ Watch on YouTube

🎮 To read (and listen): A Brief History of Video Game Music
How game music evolved from simple 8-bit beeps to full orchestral scores that rival Hollywood. (opinion: The Sims music is underappreciated)
→ Read on Activision Blizzard

🎲 This week’s wonderfully random corner of the internet 

⌨️ Tingle Synth

A writing tool that turns every keystroke into lo-fi music. As you type, soft synth tones accompany your words, creating a soundscape that makes even mundane emails feel oddly meditative.

→ Make some music while you write at tingle.boondoggle.studio/synth

📝 Word of the Week

Saudade (Portuguese) - A deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one loves but is absent; often accompanied by the knowledge that the object of longing might never return.

In music, saudade is that bittersweet ache when a song brings back a person, a place, or a version of yourself you can't reach anymore. It's not quite sadness, not quite joy. It's the beautiful melancholy of remembering what was, and knowing it's gone. This is the feeling the reminiscence bump taps into every time you hear those songs from your youth.

🧘‍♀️ Question of the Week for Introspection

What song transports you most powerfully to a specific moment in your past, and what does that version of you (the one living in that memory) still have to teach you?

See you next Sunday! Until then, keep your eyes open, your questions big, and your sense of wonder alive.

Your curious internet friend,
Ruxandra