Of Music and Musings

How do you feel when you listen to a song which you used listen in your college or high school days ?

I bet our first reaction is of nostalgia and how our life was great back in college. We think that we lived our best lives in college,had great friendships and did many great things back then. 

Well this may be a just a bias in which we succumb to.   

Most of the people think that their past was way much more better than it was in reality.They overestimate their happiness in  past .  When remembering the past events one tends to focus on the peaks and the end in a specific tenure  (this is termed as Peak-End Rule)  . Generally people remember their important achievements during the college . And in their last days of the college, everybody is filled with exhilaration ,nostalgia, and a sudden love for college.They are optimist about the new job or the graduate school they are going to join.Also, During his last days in college, one generally behaves  good with others for that he  knows that this may be the last time that he is meeting with his college mates. This makes the end of the college a happier time. And due to Peak -End effect . The whole college becomes a happy experience. 

Now how do the songs come into the picture ?

For that we have to understand Association effect.Association effect means that if there are two events occurring in any given point of time  ,we associate the stimuli of one event to the outcome of another . For example , smell of the wet mud makes us feel fresh . This is  because the mud becomes wet during rains while  we also feel fresh due to the moisture in the air. Overtime the wet mud gets associated with the freshness of rains. 

A Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov, tried to induce the association in an experiment: Everyday Pavlov used to feed the dog and ring a bell . One day he stopped feeding the dog but did ring the bell , and what he observed was the saliva coming out of the dog's mouth .Thus  Ringing bell had took on the association with food. IT did not matter whether the food was given or not , the dog got salivated anyhow.

Like wise , when people listen to the songs of their college time they associate them with the 'Good old' college days. So whenever you hear a Bruce Springsteen,or a Bryan Adams ,you drift towards this bias . Not just college time , we associate many events in life with the songs we had listened to at that time .Nonetheless this  is one of the amusing biases to succumb to.