When getting ready for a big game, few athletes listen to Mozart. When you are getting ready for bed, you don’t listen to Nicki Minaj.  When you are getting ready to go out to a party, you don’t listen to Bon Iver. These may just seem like basic facts, but what is the reasoning behind them?

People often pick the songs they listen to it based on their mood. Depending on what is going on in their life at the moment they will listen to particular songs. For instance, athletes have certain songs that pump them up for games or people listen to classical music when writing or doing homework.

These are just activities that require certain songs but often people go through time periods. For example, when people go through breakups they often have a few go-to songs that being them comfort. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that, like when someone just listens to the same few songs all the time for a long period of time. Eventually though, these time periods pass but the songs remain.

So what happens when you hear the song again? For some people it just brings back the mood and for others it brings back the memory or reminds them of the time. Since most of the time people choose what music they want to listen to, certain songs trigger those past feelings. According to an article on Live Science, research done by Petr Janata has led him to believe that the part of the brain responsible for this is known as the medial pre-frontal cortex.

“What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head.” said Petr Janata. “It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person’s face in your mind’s eye.” Often enough, it is not just a person or distinct memory, but just a feeling or a mood. So what happens when the song picks the mood for you?

A lot of the time, music can alter your mood without you even knowing. You could be listening to an up-beat song one minute and then when a sad song comes on you can go into a depression. It may just be the chords and the sound of the song, but odds are it’s because of a past mood you felt when listening to the particular song in the past.

So the next time you are trying to decide what playlist, or Pandora station, or artist to listen to, remember that the songs you pick will affect you for longer than the three minutes the song is playing.