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Study: People Bond with Music in Teenage Years

VOA News

   Researchers have taken a scientific look at why people love the music
   they do and how it connects to important times in their lives.

   The study, published last week in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental
   Psychology, sought to look at music people hear in their teenage years
   and how that music becomes intrinsically linked to a person's "sense of
   themself."

   Researchers with the University of Westminster School of Social
   Sciences in London analyzed 80 guests on the British Broadcasting
   Company (BBC) show Desert Island Discsin which celebrities select eight
   pieces of music that they would take with them to a desert island.

   The researchers found half of the songs participants chose were
   selected because they were linked to important memories from when they
   were either between the ages of 10 and 19 or between 20 and 29. They
   theorize it is during those years that people are forming the essential
   sense of themselves.

   Researchers found the songs on Desert Island Discswere alltied to key
   transitions in participants' lives such as meeting a partner, attending
   college or some other life-altering event.

   Lead researcherUniversity of Westminster neuropsychologist Catherine
   Lovedaysaidthose songs tend to influence a person's taste in music for
   years to come.

   She saidthe memories people form in their teenage and early adult years
   are what she and her fellow researchers call "the self-defining period"
   in which the brain is "taking snapshots" of episodes more than any
   other time in a person's life.

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