That song on the radio that you heard is probably linked to negative experience in your mind such as an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend that you used to hear that song with. You could have tripped while dancing with someone to this song, and so it brings back feelings of embarrassment. Either way, you relate this song with a bad memory and that is why you felt upset.
This phenomenon’s process is described by Marc Myer’s article “Why Men Bond with the 007 Theme.” "My name is Bond, James Bond." Almost everyone world-wide knows who he is and the legacy he left behind. Young men envy Bond, aspire to be him, and are in awe at his character and lifestyle. Women can barely keep their wits about them while reminiscing at the thought of the attractive, smooth talking, and talented hero that Bond embodies. When that Bond theme song comes on, you know it. You get excited, feel the action racing through your veins as you mentally picture Bond and those sly near-death escapes. However, what we don’t realize is that this jingle impacts us on a larger scale, effecting us on whole psychobiological level, tapping into our bodies and memories.
According to Gary Marcus’s Guitar Zero, music has “special powers as a mnemonic device” that allows a person to feel certain emotions by helping him or her remember things. Furthermore, Marcus says our brains “draw heavily on our neural resources for memory, be it for the storing and recognizing specific words or phrases, or for storing and retrieving specific melodies or motifs” (Marcus 79-81). Clearly, through accessing our memories, the 007 melody creates a link between the music that is heard and when that person heard it. By doing so, the music incites a certain emotion within each individual who hears it based on his or her prior experiences or exposure to the tune. In Myer’s article this triggering of emotions through memories happens as follows, “Music travels to the auditory nerve, where it's evaluated by the cerebral networks that process our emotions—before we even identify what we're hearing. In a split second, our brain scans its files for a match. If the music unlocks memories, you are likely to reexperience the same emotions you felt when you first heard it" (Myers).
There is another important thing about the 007 theme song however, but it goes down to a more musical level. Is it the “stealthy bass line” or “the machine-gun guitar solo,” as Myer puts it, that forms this bond between men and the melody? As the article states, the theme song manipulates the music keys, “dropping the key to E-minor from A-minor for a stronger statement.” And believe it or not, this causes a biological effect on the body such that “ a feeling of action and rhythmic rocking releases a burst of dopamine” (Myers). Marcus explains this bodily reaction by saying that “different scales elicit different moods, in part because of the different relationships between different notes, and in part because we have strong cultural associations with different scales” (Marcus 9).
I’m no man, so I do not experience this extremely “more guyly” bond with the 007 theme song, nor does the song make me feel “strength, adulthood, and virility.” I do, however, enjoy Adele’s new cover of the song, and so far, my guy friends seem to think that the song is great. I do not know if it is that the song is actually an excellent cover… or that they are excited by the new Bond movie’s opening on November 9th.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358804578018422429741896.html?KEYWORDS=music+and+brain
Marcus.Gary F. Guitar Zero. New York: The Penguin Press. 2012. Print.
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