My fascination with musical memory can be traced to my beloved grandmother. She has a song for all occasions and just about any phrase you utter triggers the memory of a tune. Most are from her early years and she has a particularly fine memory for hymns. As a child I decided that I had inherited my grandma’s wonderful memory for music. I found that I could easily learn music and lyrics, and went about amassing a mental library of the sounds that I liked, including Nat King Cole’s songs, Beethoven’s symphonies, and just about every note that the Beatles ever played. All this I managed just by listening. It…

Hello Dear Reader, I have been super busy of late – the world of earworms keeps me occupied but I have also been refreshing my knowledge of music memory research for a number of projects including a chapter in my book, a TEDMED talk that I will give in April, and a chapter for another volume that I am writing with one of the lovely PhD students in our lab, Georgina. Thanks to my music memory research alerts I came across a recent paper published in PLoS ONE regarding musical imagery.  Imagery and memory are very closely related in psychology research terms, since imagery is essential for many memory processes. Research…