INTERESTING: Orchestra experiment shows older people can identify and remember musical themes as well as younger people.

Flashback: “A while back I realized that I could remember the guitar solo note-for-note from a song I hadn’t heard in 20 years. Why waste brain cells remembering that? My colleague Ben Barton suggested that in the old days, prehistoric people without writing often used songs to pass along useful knowledge. If you had the gene that let you remember the song about famine foods, you were a lot more likely to survive the famine than if you didn’t.”