Globe and Mail - The rise of the 'book tune': just hum that novel again, will you?

Think of a book you read last month or last year. Do you remember it well enough to write a reasonably detailed summary without looking at the text? Well-established memory research suggests that you probably retain only about 2 per cent of a book you read a month ago, even if you loved it. All the rest has succumbed to what Jonathan Sauer calls “the Sisyphean absurdity of forgetting almost everything you read.”…

“More people can recall song lyrics than can remember chunks of text, or even of poetry,” says Sauer. That’s because rhyme, rhythm, melody and repetition have what cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin (This is Your Brain on Music) of McGill University calls a “mutually reinforcing” effect on recollection.