My girlfriend and I have been going through a bit of a phase lately, sending each other music videos we were obsessed with as teenagers. We’re talking twenty, twenty-five years ago now, which is a horrifying number to type out. What’s caught me off guard is how many of these songs I hadn’t heard, or even thought about, since those days, and yet the second they start up I know every single word. Not the gist of them. Every word, in order, like it had just been sitting there waiting.

Nobody decides to remember all that. The song just hands it straight back to you.

Why your brain won’t let this one go

Ask me what I had for lunch on Tuesday and I’ll stare at you blankly. Play me four seconds of something from 1998 and I could probably tell you where I was standing, who I was with and what was wrong with my haircut at the time.

Turns out there’s an actual name for this: music-evoked autobiographical memory, or MEAM if you want to sound clever about it at a barbecue. Researchers have found music pulls up a memory faster and more vividly than almost any other cue, photos included. And it’s not random which songs get filed away like that. Most people’s strongest musical memories sit in their teens and early twenties, a pattern researchers call the “reminiscence bump”. Nothing to do with nostalgia being precious. It’s just your brain, back when everything felt like the most important thing that had ever happened, attaching extra weight to whatever was playing at the time.

Here’s the bit I find genuinely wild. The part of the brain that stores musical memory sits slightly apart from the bit that handles your everyday recall, which happens to be the part hit earliest and hardest by conditions like Alzheimer’s. That’s a big part of why you’ll see footage of someone who can’t recognise their own kids anymore, and yet they’ll sing every word of a song from sixty years ago, key change and all.

Not a party trick. One of the last doors still open.

Tony Bennett’s probably the most famous example. Well into an Alzheimer’s diagnosis that had taken a lot from him, he could still walk into rehearsal and perform full sets from memory, note for note. Researchers who study this stuff weren’t surprised. A familiar, personally meaningful song lights up the brain’s emotional and reward circuits at the same time, and that combination seems to reach memories a straight question never could.

What this looks like once you’re off the stage

You don’t need to be Tony Bennett for any of this to apply to you. It matters for anyone, but it matters most for people living with dementia, where so much of daily life is things quietly slipping out of reach.

Alzheimer’s Queensland, the organisation behind DACS, actually runs a music therapy program for people living with dementia out of Queensland, and it leans on exactly this idea. Sessions run through familiar song listening, singing, and playing guitar, piano and percussion, led by a qualified music therapist. The goal isn’t to entertain anyone for an hour. It’s to reach a bit of connection and memory that a normal chat can’t get to anymore.

You don’t need a diagnosis in the family for the underlying idea to hold up either. Down in New South Wales, DACS runs dementia-specific wellness and allied health programs built on the same principle: find what someone already loves, then use it to keep them tethered to who they are.

If you’d rather see the actual evidence than take my word for any of this, there’s a solid and growing body of peer-reviewed research on how music therapy affects people with Alzheimer’s, covering mood, communication and memory recall.

Build your own soundtrack now, not later

None of this needs to wait until something’s gone wrong. A few things worth doing while you’ve still got all your marbles:

• Keep the vinyl, even the embarrassing stuff
• Leave the guitar on the wall where you’ll actually see it, not in a case in the shed
• Make the playlist instead of meaning to make the playlist
• Learn to actually play that one song properly, past the intro you’ve been half-faking since 2004

Every one of those is you quietly laying down a memory anchor for the version of yourself that’s seventy, and maybe for the people who’ll be sitting next to you then too.

Keep sending your partner those old songs, cringeworthy haircuts and all. You’re basically handing them a highlight reel of who you were before they showed up, and it works both ways. That’s not sentimentality talking. That’s just how memory works, and music happens to be one of the better tools we’ve got for holding onto it.