The preliminary results of a six-month online survey of over 3000 people and 69 different nationalities were presented at this week’s British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool. So is music really a prompt for your long-forgotten memories? And is it a good thing or bad thing?

As I reported in Music and Memory: Get Back to Where You Once Belonged, researchers Martin Conway and Catriona Morrison at the University of Leeds are in the process of conducting what is thought to be the largest online survey of people’s memories of the Beatles. After collecting responses for six months, the team reported a number of interesting findings at the British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool this week.

Somewhat predictably, most of the study participants were teenagers during the Beatle’s popularity during the mid to late 1960s, although participants’ ages ranged from 17 to 87 years old. According to Morrison, fourteen years is the age when music has its strongest impact on us and we generally arrive at many of our life-long preferences for certain music during teenage years. Additionally, the researchers note that most memories reported in the survey were extremely positive, with one exception: the murder of John Lennon  in front of his New York home in 1980. Participants also recalled numerous sensory experiences associated with their memories, such as smells, sounds, and sights.

The overwhelmingly positive nature of these findings brings to question the connection between music, memory, and emotion and what the relationship ultimately means. For example, music and positive feelings have been linked with the increase in dopamine, a hormone and neurotransmitter that is associated with the pleasure system in the brain. And as Morrison explains, musical prompts may help not so much in storage, but in memory retrieval, perhaps acting as aids for recall when memory fails us as we age. Good news for an aging population in which one in five people will be over the age of 60 years by Y2010.

The study will continue for the foreseeable future and you can still add your Beatles memory to the Magical Memory Tour project. In the mean time, what song generated the most memories? The 1963 “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.” With a song like that, you know you should be glad.