Does part of a song keep playing in your head? Have you ever felt the urge to sing along or devour a section of a song for no apparent reason or even if you don’t like it? Can’t you get out of your mind—I congratulate you, how well you’re doing, I have no doubt about that—?
Well, this is a strange phenomenon that almost all of us have experienced, and it actually happens more frequently than we would like, according to Harvard university “Some surveys have found that 90% of people experience this phenomenon, and for about a third of them, it’s bothersome.” Here we will explain why this happens.
These are known as earworms, and are described as coming from the German word “Ohrwurm”, meaning musical itch. It is also characterized by repetition of musical images, paused song syndrome, or catchy music and specifically indicates when the melody enters your mind and cannot exit; It is described as a repetitive piece of music, usually about 20 seconds in length, that automatically reaches your consciousness and continues to be played repeatedly. But what is behind this event?
Harvard expert David Silberswig, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Stanley Cobb School of Medicine, co-director of the Center for Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and co-author of a 2018 paper on the neurobiological effects of music: For some songs to get stuck in our heads, explained this is for “Harvard Gazettewhich is the official Harvard University news website.
David Silberswig Indicates In the first place, there are certain musical characteristics that make songs more likely to become catchy, such as if the piece is repetitive, if there is a longer duration of some notes, if the intervals between notes are smaller. Also, songs that evoke some kind of emotional charge, whether consciously or unconsciously, or songs associated with a particular memory, can often be those songs that get stuck in your head.”
In addition, it is clear that something very strange is happening in our brain to give way to this phenomenon, which is derived from different neural networks associated with the exchange of information in certain areas of the brain. a) yes, Describe Silbersweig that networks:
- The auditory cortex, which is located on both sides of the head (temporal lobe) responsible for musical perception.
- The hippocampus, or parahippocampal gyrus, is important in encoding and retrieval of working memory that provides the temporary storage and processing of information needed for complex cognitive tasks such as language, learning, and thinking.
- Vocal loop, which is characterized as a system of linguistic articulation that allows the process of holding something in the mind, such as a mental notebook, for a certain number of seconds after its utterance.
- Emotional regions of the brain, such as the amygdala and ventral striatum, which are involved in negative and rewarding emotions, respectively.
All of these neural networks are connected and function normally to remember music or parts of rhyme, and the expert notes that our brains evolved for this, as “music along with rhyme before the written word has been used in many cultures to help people remember oral history.”
However, when this repetition of musical images occurs, it is as if our brain is stuck. Indicates Silbersweig states that “What happens is that the connections in our brain that include these areas get stuck, which leads to the automatic playback of musical memories.”
Finally, the expert adds, for this reason, “some research suggests that people with working memory difficulties, such as those with attention deficit disorder, may have fewer worms in their ears, while people with OCD may have fewer worms.” As there are these involuntarily recurring rings in their heads, they may be more likely to get earworms.”
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