Researches from the University of Westminster and City University of London analyzed the music choices from guests on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs program and found some pretty interesting results.
They discovered that the music people listen to between the ages of 10 and 30 will define them for the rest of their lives.
‘Self-defining period’ is the term they used and said it connected individuals to the people, places, and times that are deterministic of their identity.
In the previous program, guests are invited to imagine that they are being cast away to a desert island. They are asked to choose eight records to take with them to the Island. Researches reviewed the total of the responses of 80 guests.
Results show that people imagining themselves in isolation preferred music reminding them of a time when they were aged between 10 and 30. Most of them choose music that reminded them of an important person or an important turning point in their life. Researchers speculated these were ways for the individuals to really define themselves.
A study from the researchers shows that reason for choosing a song is (17%) it reminds someone of their relationship with a specific person. (16.2%) cause it was reminiscent of a memory of a period of time. The last one and most popular is the song’s connection to specific memories regarding the information of identity through life-changing moments at (12.9%).
Professor Catherin Loveday, Neuropsychologist at the University of Westminster and Lead Researcher said, “Guests frequently chose songs because they were related to important memories that occurred during their teenage years. This extends previous findings by showing that music from this time has a particular meaning, primarily because it relates to memories from this very important developmental period of our life,”.
Source: Interesting Engineering