05: Brainworms, Sticky Music, and Catchy Tunes

Sometimes phrases of music keep repeating in our brains for hours maybe even days as if it was a tic that is impossible to stop. Earworms are a special type of music that is especially made to stick to people’s brain. His friend Nick Younes told him how a song called “Love and Marriage” got stuck in his brain for ten days until it eventually faded on its own. During that time Nick tried every possible way to get rid of the song but he couldn’t stop it.

The author mentioned Mark Twain’s story called A Literary Nightmare, were a man gets a repetitive jingle in his mind and starts infecting all the people around him. He also wonders what are the reasons that make specific types of music get repeated over and over inside our brains? Is it the simplicity, repetition or something else?

He also made a link between patients such as post-encephalatic parkinsonian disease such as rose who suffered from repeated notes for forty-three years, until she was introduced to L-dopa. Finally, normal pathways for this phenomenon could be linked to Rose’s disease and many other diseases such as autism were repetition is a main part of the disease symptoms.