Music and Memory: Why Live Concerts Makes Us Nostalgic

In September, I went to see Counting Crows, a band whose music formed the soundtrack of my adolescence. The people alongside me at the Greek Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, were mainly in their 40s and 50s; people who might have had a babysitter waiting at home, or a slightly achy back. (I had both.)

As we belted out the lyrics of “Mr. Jones” together — a sea of fans singing a decades-old song — I could’ve sworn I was a teenager again. I forgot that I had a mortgage, two kids and a favorite brand of tea bag. I turned to my husband (it was a shock to remember that I had one), and said, “Did we just travel back in time?”

This experience is fairly common, said Dr. Andrew E. Budson, a professor of neurology at Boston University and author of “Why We Forget and How to Remember Better: The Science Behind Memory.” Music has a powerful ability to make us feel like we’ve been transported to the past.

Many experts say that, as we get older, we tend to remember things that happened to us in our adolescence and early adulthood more than in other eras of our lives, a phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. Though there are several theories, some experts speculate that it’s because we’re forming our identities during this time, and our brains are particularly receptive to new information. It’s also a period that often includes social milestones, like a first relationship.

So the music we listened to when we were in our teens and early 20s tends to stick with us and evoke strong memories when we hear it again, said Kelly Jakubowski, an associate professor of music psychology at Durham University who studies music and memory. And for many of us, the music we liked when we were younger remains our favorite as we age.

Nostalgia can be good for us, staving off loneliness and enhancing well-being. And while listening to a song or an album can activate memories that make us nostalgic, there are a few reasons that a live concert magnifies the experience.

Memory acts like a time machine.

When we’re initially forming a memory from an experience, different regions of the brain become active. There are several theories about exactly how this happens, but many experts believe that the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory and learning, binds all of the elements of an event into a single memory. If it’s important or emotional, a neighboring region of the brain, the amygdala, will boost activity in the hippocampus to ensure that information is encoded and stored as a lasting memory.

When some part of your current experience matches some part of a memory, the hippocampus helps retrieve and reconstruct the remaining elements of the original event.

“The reason it feels like time travel is that you actually have the same patterns of activity in the brain; when you pull up the memory, they become active,” Dr. Budson said. So things you saw or heard or felt originally, “you’re able to experience many of them again.”

Music is particularly good at doing this because it activates so many different brain regions, Dr. Budson said. Plus, a song lasts several minutes, so “it encourages you to be thinking about that memory and retrieving that memory not just for a few seconds, like looking at a picture might, but for a prolonged period of time.”

People and places can influence nostalgia.

Last year, Anna Scott, a retired radio D.J. in Mount Vernon, Wash., attended concerts by the Eagles and Paul McCartney. “You feel young again,” said Ms. Scott, 71. “It’s nice to have that feeling back.”

Another reason that hearing a band live can take you back to your youth is that music activates the motor system, said Dr. Budson, which is why we sometimes dance or tap our feet. And being in a crowd can make that urge stronger as “there is a lot of contagiousness to the kinds of responses people are having,” said Elizabeth H. Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Research has shown, for instance, that we often clap because others clap and even synchronize heart rate and breathing rate during concerts.

Katie Swinford, 43, a teacher in Cincinnati, has seen the band Phish roughly 20 times since the mid-1990s. The concerts are her “safe and happy place,” she said, where she’s soothed by “the familiarity of the music and the people.”

Though memory hasn’t been studied much in a live concert setting, said Dr. Jakubowski, studies comparing recorded and live listening experiences have found that being among other people contributes to your enjoyment. In a crowd of like-minded fans, you may feel “not only connected to the artist, but connected to all these people around you,” she said.

Location can also heighten the experience. In the summer of 2021, Kristen Bachich attended an Alanis Morissette show with high school friends at a Camden, N.J., theater that she had frequented as a teenager.

“It gave us so many weird feelings,” Ms. Bachich said. “We’re all 40-year-old moms now, but once upon a time we were teenagers screaming ‘You Oughta Know’ in the back seat while our own moms drove us to the mall.”

We tend to remember things more strongly in the environment where we formed the original memory, a concept known as context-dependent memory, said Matthew Schulkind, a psychology professor at Amherst College who studies memory and music cognition. And “the more similar the context is, the more powerful that effect is going to be,” he said.

Your time-travel mileage may vary.

There are pieces of music we’ve heard so much that we no longer associate them with a specific time and place, Dr. Budson said. At some point you may have listened to a song “so many different times that it’s lost its unique time traveling capacity,” he said.

While many things can enhance the feeling of being transported when you see an artist you loved in your youth, Dr. Budson said, it ultimately depends most on whether being at the concert triggers more relevant matches in your brain than hearing a recorded version of the artist.

For me, though, concerts seem to win out. I’m already looking at upcoming tour dates for the Lemonheads and the Smashing Pumpkins, figuring out when I can buy my next ticket to 1996.

Holly Burns is a frequent contributor to The New York Times.