Blast from the Past

Abstract

This chapter considers the psychological mechanism known as episodic memory. Episodic memory is defined as a process whereby an emotion is induced in a listener because the music evokes a personal memory of a specific event in the person's life; when the memory is evoked, so is also the emotion associated with the event. The emotion can be intense, perhaps because the physiological response pattern to the original event is stored in memory, together with the experiential content. Episodic memory requires detached mental representations (i.e. representations of events or objects that are not currently sensed in the external world) and a sense of self, which ties together the individual episodes. Episodic memory is also an important aspect of what it means to be human.