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The Passion Years – Part 2

By Wayne Clouten, BPR

In part one of this exploration of why songs from a person’s teenage years stimulate so much passion we identified that it is to do with how memory is stored differently in your brain during the ages of 13 to 18. In part two, we will now dig a little deeper.

There is a phenomena researchers call the “reminiscence bump,” and it has nothing to do with sentimentality.  The “reminiscence bump” refers to the number of vivid autobiographical memories that tend to cluster around the period when a person was aged between fifteen and twenty-five. When older adults recall events important to them, those memories are not distributed evenly across their lifespan and tend to congregate around their teens and early adulthood.

It just so happens music from that period activates this “bump” with remarkable passion and precision. A song you heard at sixteen and loved can retrieve not just the melody and lyrics but what was going on around you at the time, like the weather, who was with you and what they were wearing and even smells and tastes.  That level of sensory detail isn’t linked to songs you hear later in life. The interesting question is why?

The answer lives in the adolescent brain itself. The brain at fifteen is not a smaller version of the brain at forty. From a neurological perspective it is a fundamentally different organ, one with heightened emotional reactivity, greater neural plasticity, and a dopamine system that responds to novelty with an intensity that adult brains simply cannot match.  Luckily for the radio industry, music enters that system like water into a sponge.

What makes the thirteen-to-eighteen year-old window so potent for music specifically is the convergence of three things: emotional intensity, identity formation, and neurological openness. A fifteen -year-old isn’t just hearing a song. They are using that song to figure out who they are. The music becomes a tool for self-definition, for signalling membership into social groups, for dealing with emotions that are new and at times overwhelming.

An adult brain hearing a new song at fifty is doing none of those things. That persons identity is already built. Their emotional vocabulary already exists. The song may be very much enjoyed but it will not form part of that person’s emotional DNA.

That said, there are some exceptions and they relate to highly emotional experiences or life changing events that create an opportunity for a particular song to imprint itself. It is like a doorway to another dimension that temporarily opens allowing songs to once again meld with that person’s autobiographical memory and identity.

A very good example of this is Germany at the time the Soviet Union collapsed and East Germany ceased to exist at the end of 1989.  It was a highly emotional period, mostly joyous and deeply personal for most.  Songs from that period have proven to hold a special place in the hearts of German people ever since.  Speak to a Berliner old enough to remember when the wall came down and they will tell you exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they were wearing, what they had for breakfast and the songs they were listening to on the 9^th November 1989.

The message in all of this complex science is however simple for music driven radio stations.

• Play the music your listeners love as much as possible. Know these songs as intimately as you know your mother’s smile.
• Celebrate and share your listeners passion for the music they love at every opportunity.
• Don’t create “programming”, create listening experiences.
• For CHR stations targeting under 25’s; hug your audience as close as you can. Don’t be the same as the other stations – look to differentiate as much as possible, meld your brand to the formation of their autobiographical memory.
• Know, that despite what doom-merchants say about radio’s prospects with the teenage listening market, those same teenagers in a decade or so’s time will be hot prospects for radio brands celebrating the music of their youth.

Want to know more about how to unlock the passion of your listeners?…just call us.

#scientific references available upon quest