“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
We are not only what we remember. We are when we remember.
Identity is not a static inventory of traits or facts. It is a rhythm—a felt continuity through time. We do not just carry memories; we are carried by them, shaped by how they unfold, how they return. The architecture of selfhood is temporal. And memory, to endure, must have a beat.
Neuroscience has begun to illuminate this rhythm. Deep within the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, specialised neurons known as time cells activate in sequence as we experience events. These cells mark not what occurred, but when. Like a hidden metronome, they scaffold our lived past into an ordered flow—an internal chronology that gives coherence to the our self-identity.
When this flow is disrupted—by trauma, dementia, or grief—identity trembles. We feel fragmented. Unmoored. We forget not just the past, but how we used to move through time.
Music, by contrast, offers particular form and shape. It turns duration into pattern. It gives silence a structure and emotion a framework. In the presence of music, the brain begins to entrain—to synchronise its neural oscillations with the external beat. This rhythmic alignment stabilises our perception of time, allowing memories to find their place again.
A familiar melody can act as a mnemonic thread, weaving back what felt lost. It doesn’t merely trigger recall, it remembers for us. It restores the temporal scaffolding of identity, reminding us who we were, and that we are still becoming, through musical memory.
This is more than metaphor. Among the Dogon of Mali, speech and song are conceived as acts of weaving. The stomach is seen as a forge where fire transforms breath into sound vapor; the throat becomes a loom, the tongue a shuttle, the teeth a reed. To speak is to thread meaning through silence. In this cosmology, music is not performed—it is metabolised. It rises from the body like cloth unspooling from a sacred instrument. Modern neuroscience, surprisingly, aligns with this: interoception—the sensing of internal bodily states—shapes emotion, voice, and memory. When rhythm synchronises with breath and heartbeat, memory is not simply recalled. It is re-embodied. It remembers us from within.
Other traditions echo this embodied cosmology. In Ainu oral culture of northern Japan, identity is said to reside in the yukar—an ancestral chant that must be sung to remain alive. The person is the song; if the chant is forgotten, so is the lineage. These aren’t metaphors. They are frameworks in which memory survives not as data, but as tempo, vibration, breath. When we hum, we are not just remembering—we are participating in a continuity that exceeds us, one that has always known who we are.
The Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin described the chronotope—a fusion of time and space that gives narrative its shape. Music creates living chronotopes. A song is not only a memory, but a place in time. When we hear it again, we return. The moment becomes accessible, breathable, alive.
This is why the right music can feel like an extension of the self. It doesn’t simply evoke feeling—it binds it to a rhythm, a return, a sequence. It helps the self remain in motion even when time feels stalled. It teaches us how to persist.
When words fail or time distorts, music reorients us. It says: you were here.
It says: you are still.
In this light, music is not only art. It is a temporal prosthesis, a memory technology, a co-author of selfhood. To listen is to participate in the remembering. To let rhythm realign us. To let sound restore sequence.
Music remembers for us when we cannot.
And sometimes, through it, we remember how to be ourselves.
