RCs: 71 to 80 Questions for CAT with Answers PDF

Passage

Why do the songs I heard when I was teenager sound sweeter than anything I listen to as an adult? I’m happy to report that my own failures of discernment as a music critic may not be entirely to blame. In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have confirmed that these songs hold disproportionate power over our emotions. And researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults – a connection that doesn’t weaken as we age. Musical nostalgia, in other words, isn’t just a cultural phenomenon: it’s a neuronic command. And no matter how sophisticated our tastes might otherwise grow to be, our brains may stay jammed on those songs we obsessed over during the high drama of adolescence.
To understand why we grow attached to certain songs, it helps to understand the brain’s relationship with music. When you listen to a song that triggers personal memories, your prefrontal cortex, which maintains information relevant to your personal life and relationships, will spring into action. But memories are meaningless without emotion – and aside from love and drugs, nothing spurs an emotional reaction like music. Brain imaging studies show that our favourite songs stimulate the brain’s pleasure circuit, which releases an influx of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and other neurochemicals that make us feel good. The more we like a song, the more we get treated to neurochemical bliss, flooding our brains with some of the same neurotransmitters that cocaine chases after.
Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody. But in young people, the spark turns into a fireworks show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development – and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important – especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams (and embarrassments).
On its own, these neurological pyrotechnics would be enough to imprint certain songs into our brain. But there are other elements at work. First, some songs become memories in and of themselves, so forcefully do they worm their way into memory. Many of us can vividly remember the first time we heard that one Beatles (or Backstreet Boys) song that, decades later, we still sing at every karaoke night. Second, these songs form the soundtrack to what feel, at the time, like the most vital and momentous years of our lives. The music that plays during our first kiss or our first dance gets attached to that memory and takes on a glimmer of its profundity. We may recognize in retrospect that the dance wasn’t really all that profound. But even as the importance of the memory itself fades, the emotional afterglow tagged to the music lingers.
As fun as these theories may be, their logical conclusion – you’ll never love another song the way you loved the music of your youth – is a little depressing. It’s not all bad news, of course: Our adult tastes aren’t really weaker; they’re just more mature, allowing us to appreciate complex aesthetic beauty on an intellectual level. No matter how adult we may become, however, music remains an escape hatch from our adult brains back into the raw, unalloyed passion of our youths. The nostalgia that accompanies our favourite songs isn’t just a fleeting recollection of earlier times; it’s a neurological wormhole that gives us a glimpse into the years when our brains leapt with joy at the music that’s come to define us. Those years may have passed. But each time we hear the songs we loved, the joy they once brought surges anew.