Counting Down to 90 - Week 1569 - The Reminiscence Bump

The Concept Explained

Counting Down to 90 - Week 1579

Why 1579

Bhavin's WritingsBhavin Jankharia

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I started listening to rock and metal only after entering junior college in 1980. Before that, it was all Hindi film music. In the early and mid 70s, I had a radio, likely BUSH, on which I would listen to all kinds of Hindi film music, right from the early 1900s to the latest hits. I also figured out how to use shortwave (SW) to listen to Binaca Geetmala hosted by Ameen Sayani on Radio Ceylon and I remember that the weekly hits used to air on Wednesday or Thursday, sometime around 8 or 9 at night.

By the time I was 15, I had likely heard most of the popular Hindi songs by most singers and even knew the names of the lyricists and music directors. The only English songs I’d heard till then were by Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley, thanks to my elder sister Bina’s vinyl record collection.

Junior college opened up a new world of music…English pop, rock, jazz, fusion, and other genres. Hindi film music was always present, but it was no longer my only focus. My exposure to new Hindi songs decreased, and I stopped listening to old Hindi songs, unless I heard them accidentally in a movie, concert, or events especially in the last 10 years, where amateur wannabe singers grab any opportunity to hold a mic and warble old Hindi song covers.

Last Tuesday, my family and I attended a concert where Sonu Nigam performed a Mohd Rafi tribute. He sang around 50 songs, some fully, some partially. It was wonderful. I hadn’t heard most of them in over 30 years, but I could easily sing along…the lyrics and tunes just resurfaced from the deep recesses of my brain like magic. It was crazy.

The genie doesn’t seem to want to go back soon. Since Tuesday, I’ve been humming random Mohd Rafi songs while reading scans or doing procedures, songs I hadn’t heard in decades. 

This phenomenon is classic semantic and episodic memory recall…far deeper than muscle memory (which applies only to motor tasks) or what Bijal called "spinal level" recall. It's purely cerebral, yet feels almost instinctual.

We have long-term memory connections forged in our childhood and teen years that are far stronger than similar later memories…this is called a reminiscence bump...when we remember things from ages 10 to 30 better than later events, likely due to the emotional intensity and social context associated with these memories.

In many ways, my "Counting Down to 90" series is an exploration of my own reminiscence bump. Each week, I find myself connecting current events with memories from the past, searching for threads of meaning that tie past to present.

A series of recent deaths has further stirred this memory pool.

When I read that Shyam Benegal died last week, the first memory that surfaced was Shashi Kapoor in a fetal position in his room in “Kalyug”, a movie I had found to be extremely powerful. Or when Zakir Hussain’s death was announced, the first thing I remembered was the “Wah Taj” campaign from the 80s. And when I heard of ex-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s death, my brain immediately recalled the amazing changes his policies as finance minister brought about after 1991, enabling me to get a bank loan in 1994 to buy a CT scanner from Siemens, which started our growth as a healthcare provider. 

When I heard of Dr. Sunil Pandya’s death, I vividly remembered the brain cutting sessions in KEM Hospital on Wednesday or Thursday afternoons, where we correlated diseased brains with CT scan and MRI findings (I was a lecturer for a brief 9 months in 1990-1991). Though KEM lacked a CT or MRI in the early 90s, Dr. Pandya and his colleagues kept records and films of all the scans done on operated patients. I learnt more from those scans and pathology correlation than from lectures, textbooks, and articles. In later years, Dr. Pandya kept in touch, sending relevant articles by email and discussing patients with me on occasion.

His death hit the hardest of all the people lost this month, probably because he was the one person among all of them I knew and who knew me. 

"The Reminiscence Bump" is such an apt name for the way our younger selves reach through time to remind us who we are, triggered by a song, a death, a meeting, or a random memory that crops up out of nowhere.