There's a scientific reason your favorite song from high school still gives you chills, and it's not just nostalgia talking.
My favorite song is "Pour Some Sugar on Me." Don't ask me why. By all rights it should probably be "Joy to the World" - that's a close second - or some Bon Jovi song. But it's not. I can hear it right now just writing this, and it's almost impossible to sit still.
The last time I really heard it - not just had it playing in the background, but heard it - was in a tiny bar in the Castro in San Francisco, one last night out with my team. No dance floor whatsoever. Didn't matter. I sang every word, danced badly, and I'm still smiling about that night.
Music does this to all of us. "Friends Are Friends Forever" by Michael W. Smith takes me straight back to a specific friend from years ago. Total Eclipse of the Heart is my college besties, all of us screaming the chorus like we invented it. GB Leighton or Bon Jovi and I'm twenty-three again, convinced my high school best friend and I had the best taste in music of anyone alive. And my wedding song still means exactly what it meant the day we danced to it.
The science behind the time machine
There's a real reason certain songs - usually the ones from your teens and twenties - hit so much harder than anything released last week. Psychologists call it the reminiscence bump: memories formed roughly between ages 10 and 30 get encoded more vividly and recalled more easily than memories from any other period of life. Researchers Carol Krumhansl and Justin Zupnick found this is especially true for music. Songs from that window carry outsized emotional weight for the rest of your life, because your brain was laying down its deepest, most formative memories at the exact same time you were discovering that music.
There's a second piece too, and it explains why your body wants to move before your brain agrees to it. In a landmark study, researchers Valorie Salimpoor and Robert Zatorre used brain imaging to show that peak emotional moments in music - the parts that give you actual chills - trigger real dopamine release in the striatum, the same reward pathway activated by food and other deeply pleasurable experiences. Dopamine surges not just during the peak, but in the seconds leading up to it, as your brain anticipates the moment based on everything it already knows about how the song goes.
Put those two findings together, and a favorite song isn't just nostalgia. It's a memory your brain filed away during some of its most formative years, wired directly into a reward system that fires specifically because you already know, note for note, exactly what's coming.
Try this
Build a mixtape on purpose. Not a generic "feel good" playlist, but a specific list: one song for a person, one for a place, one for a version of yourself you want to remember more often. Keep it somewhere easy to reach, so when you need a fast route back to joy, you don't have to go searching for it.
And the next time one of your songs comes on unexpectedly, let yourself actually have the reaction. Sing the words. Move badly, on purpose, with no dance floor required.
What song would show up on your mixtape without a moment's hesitation, and who does it bring back with it?
This is one chapter from my upcoming book, Be With: 39 Habits to Practice Joy, out this fall. I'm publishing one chapter a week as I finish writing - subscribe to the newsletter to catch each one, or listen to the full story on the podcast.