Today I have been reading a new article with another amazing story of how musical memory can survive in the face of  neurological injury and/or illness. These extreme cases are rare, but they tell us something crucial about the nature of musical memory – that it is uniquely vivid and long lasting, as well as being personal for each individual. I have always been convinced that there are great things to be gained by learning more about how musical memory works; so much we can understand about how to maximise memory in general and how to recover memory in difficult cases of dementia and other neurological conditions. Musical memory has…

Hello Dear Reader, Today will not be a blog in the traditional sense, but instead I would like to give you access to a link for a lecture of mine that was just finished a few weeks ago. It is an online accessible discussion of what I find fascinating about musical memory. It covers 3 main areas: 1) Is musical memory unique? (i.e. how is it different to other types of memory, such as verbal memory?) 2) How does musical memory work? (i.e. how do musicians remember hours of music for performance) 3) What happens when memory begins to fail, and why does musical memory often survive so well in…