In my life: memory, self and The Beatles

ABSTRACT

In a large-scale study, we asked people for their memories of The Beatles. Over four thousand respondents completed an online questionnaire. The memory could be related to a song, album, event, TV, film, or even a personal encounter. Respondents judged the age at which the event remembered had occurred and rated the memory for vividness, emotional intensity, valence and rehearsal. We found 38% of the memories were classified as “seeing The Beatles live”, 25% “buying Beatles music”, 20% “love of The Beatles” and 17% of the memories were “listening to Beatles songs with other people” – what we refer to as cascading memories. Among the younger respondents (aged 26 and under), 84% of the memories were cascading in nature. The memories dated to what we term the “self-defining period” in autobiographical memory (previously termed “the reminiscence bump”), with a mean age-at-encoding of 13.6 years, which is consistent with other studies of memories associated with music. We propose that these memories reflect the formation of generational identity [Mannheim, K. (1952). The problem of generations. In K. Mannheim (Ed.), Essays on the sociology knowledge (pp. 276–321). Routledge & Keegan Paul].

KEYWORDS:

• Memories
• reminiscence bump
• self-defining period
• Beatles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study will be available upon request.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This study was conducted in 2008, thus the mean age of the participants today would be 64 years.

2 Full details can be found at: http://www.image-zafar.com/Logicieluk.html.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.