Journey on a magical mystery tour of your Beatles memories

Aug 2 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Recollections are an ongoing theme in Beatles songs and now they are being used in pioneering memory research. Laura Davis reports

PAUL MCCARTNEY was standing in the Cavern when he felt a punch on his shoulder.

“Who was that?” he demanded of the two lads behind him. The guilty party pointed at his friend. “It was him,” he lied.

Early 1965, this time at an Army base in the Sarawak jungle. A helicopter arrives with the reels for A Hard Day’s Night but one third of the soldiers stationed there are manning the defences and miss out on the screening.

“It was gut-wrenchingly frustrating to hear, albeit faintly, those wonderful songs as we stared out into the blackness,” one of them, now aged 66, recalls.

“The temptation to open up with a machine gun and spoil everybody's fun by getting them all to ‘stand to’ was almost irresistible.”

Different places, different people – two memories linked by a single band. But what a band, comments Catriona Morrison, senior lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Leeds, who is using people’s recollections of The Beatles in her research.

“They are a unique global phenomenon that people can relate to in a way that they can’t arguably relate to any other band,” she says.

“We’re starting to turn our attention to alternative ways of looking at memory.

“We’ve pretty much exhausted the lab-type techniques so we’re looking at tools we can use to investigate memory in a more ecologically valid way, in a way that represents life better.”

Catriona and her colleague Prof Martin Conway are collecting people’s stories on their Magical Memory Tour website.

Although the link between music and the mind has been the subject of scientific study before, this is the first time research has focused on an individual band.

THE findings will be announced at the BA Festival of Science, held in Liverpool next month.

“We’ll be looking at the extent to which music can be used as a tool to ground and cue memories.

“We’ll be asking, if you did use music as a cue for people would you be able to enhance memory.

“Music is linked very strongly to emotions so if you hear a piece that’s been associated with an event in your life it brings you back very strongly to that same emotion.

“We’re interested in which types of songs generate the most memories.”

The website is divided into sections so you can post your own recollections according the song or the Beatle or the Fab Four-linked news event that triggers it.

You can also read other people’s memories, which range from the mundane to the eccentric.