Neural Nostalgia
Why do we love the music we heard as teenagers?
Music plays two roles in this process. 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, our first prom, our first toke, gets attached to that memory and takes on a glimmer of its profundity. We may recognize in retrospect that prom wasn’t really all that profound. But even as the importance of the memory itself fades, the emotional afterglow tagged to the music lingers.
astound me: D.A. Królak 