There have certainly been records that have been hugely popular and some of those have had a message. Can there be many songs that really did change the world? Did they really change the hearts and minds of ordinary people?

There is one, Goettingen, which did, but it’s hardly known now.

Even though France and Germany are neighbors, there was bad feeling between them 50 years ago as a result of World War Ⅱ. Into this area of hatred and anger stepped a singer with a gentle voice.

Barbara was her stage name. She took it from her Russian grandmother. She was born in Paris in 1930. She was Jewish and so a target (目标) for the Nazis. But, twenty years after the end of the Second World War, she travelled to the German city Goettingen. She fell in love with the city and its people and recorded the song Goettingen, first in French and then in German.

It moved her German audience at the theatre.The song became a hit.A street was named after her. The city gave its Medal of Honor to her. The song’s popularity made an important contribution to repairing France­Germany relations.

One of the people in the audience was a student by the name of Gerhard Schroeder. He later became Chancellor of Germany. He said, “I was a college student when she came to sing. It went to our hearts, the start of a wonderful friendship between our countries.”

Listening to the song today, it’s easy to understand its attraction then. It is still a beautiful song of love, although it is a bit sad in parts.Barbara had much to be sad about. She was extremely frightened by the war.

In Germany, she was loved for the love she had given to the people. In France, she was a star. Streets were named after her there, too. A stamp had her face on it. When she died in 1997, 250 thousand people went to the funeral (葬礼).

Lionel Jospin, who served as Prime Minister of France from 1997 to 2002, once said, “Barbara was a woman who knew suffering and understood the suffering of others.”

When Carol Howard’s Alzheimer’s disease (老年痴呆症) worsened, often she couldn’t recognize her husband. “But if she heard a 1960s Simon &. Garfunkel’s song playing, Howard could sing every word effortlessly,” her husband says.

This ability of music to call up vivid memories is a phenomenon well known to brain researchers. It can bring back intense memories from years past-for many, more strongly than other senses such as taste and smell-and cause strong emotions from those earlier experiences.

“Music can open forgotten doors to your memory,” says Andrew E. Budson, MD, an expert at Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System. “Music can take you back in time and fire up your brain and get it going,” he says. “We all have the familiar experience of going back to our hometown, visiting our high school and feeling the memories come flooding back. Music can do the same things. It provides an emotional setting that allows us to recall all those memories.”

“Music activates different parts of the brain, making it an especially versatile (多功能的) tool,” says Amy Belfi, principal investigator in the Music Cognition and Aesthetics Lab at Missouri University of Science and Technology. “We can use it to improve mood, to help us learn, to socially bond with other people. It becomes part of our identity.”

Some experts also see a role for music, which can ease anxiety. Frank Russo, professor of psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University, says he believes this ultimately will be possible. He is chief scientific officer of a company that is developing a music player that uses artificial intelligence to create an individualized play list designed to guide a patient from a state of anxiety to one of calm.

“One of the really challenging things for caregivers is the anxiety,” says Russo, whose research focuses on the relationship between neuroscience (神经系统科学) and music. “Music has a real opportunity here.”