Oops, I did it again
28 Jul 01
Some songs just won't leave you alone. We wouldn't be the
same without them
IF YOU'RE familiar with the oeuvre of Britney Spears, the headline on
this page has probably triggered a pop song of the same name to
start playing in your head. If you're unlucky, it may haunt you for
hours or even days, repeating over and over until you're heartily sick
of it. It happens to most people now and then.
"I hear music in my head almost all the time," says Gabriela Imreh, a
concert pianist in Ewing, New Jersey. "I hope I'm not going to be
categorised to the loony bin." Even though she plays classical music
all day, Imreh can't get Mrs Robinson out of her head because she
recently saw the play of The Graduate at a London theatre. "It's been
driving me crazy," she says.
But why does the mind annoy us like this? No one knows for sure, but
it's probably because the brain is better at holding onto information
than it is at knowing what information is important. "It's a
manifestation of an aspect of memory which is normally an asset to
us, but in this instance it can be a nuisance," says Roger Chaffin, a
psychologist at the University of Connecticut.
This eager acquisitiveness may have helped our ancestors remember
important oral histories heard round the campfire. Today, students
use it to learn new material, and musicians rely on it to memorise
complicated pieces. But when this useful function goes awry it can
get you stuck on a tune. Unfortunately, frothy, repetitive pop tunes
are, by their very nature, more likely to stick than something more
inventive.
The annoying playback probably originates in the auditory cortex, the
"struggling musician" of the brain. Located just inside the temple, this
region handles both listening and playback of music and other sounds.
Neuroscientist Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal proved
this two years ago when he asked volunteers to replay the theme
from the TV show Dallas in their heads. Brain imaging studies showed
that this reprise activated the same region of the auditory cortex as
when the people heard the song.
Not every stored musical memory emerges into consciousness,
however. The frontal lobe of the brain gets to decide which thoughts
get airtime and which ones become basement tapes. But it can get
tired or depressed, which is when people most commonly suffer from
song-in-head syndrome and other intrusive thoughts, says Susan Ball,
a clinical psychologist at Indiana University School of Medicine in
Indianapolis. And once the unwanted song surfaces, it's hard to stuff
it back down into the subconscious. "The more you try to suppress a
thought, the more you get it," says Ball. "We call this the pink
elephant phenomenon." Tell the brain not to think about pink
elephants, and it's guaranteed to do so, she says.
At their extreme, frontal lobe problems can lead to
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), in which repetitive songs and
other thoughts ("Did I turn off the stove?") can cause severe
emotional distress. OCD can be debilitating because it involves other
brain regions, and produces a level of anxiety that is absent in people
merely stuck on a particular song. But the two phenomena both
involve the frontal lobe, Zatorre and Ball agree, and therapies
designed to disarm obsessive thoughts may also help purge the mind
of stuck songs.
For those not severely afflicted, simply avoiding certain kinds of music
can help. "I know certain pieces that are kind of sticky to me, so I will
not play them in the early morning for fear that they will run around in
my head all day," says Steven Brown, who trained as a classical
pianist but is now a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health
Science Center at San Antonio. He says he always has a song in his
head and, even more annoying, his mind never seems to make it all
the way through. "It tends to involve short fragments between, say,
5 or 15 seconds. They seem to get looped, for hours sometimes," he
says.
Brown's experience of repeated musical loops may represent a
phenomenon called "chunking", in which people remember musical
phrases as a single unit of memory, says Caroline Palmer, a
psychologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. Most listeners have
little choice about what chunks they remember. Particular chunks may
be especially sticky if you hear them often or if they follow certain
predictable patterns, such as the chord progression of rock 'n' roll
music. Palmer's research shows that the more a piece of music
conforms to these patterns, the easier it is to remember. That's why
you're more likely to be haunted by the tunes of Britney Spears than
J. S. Bach.
But this ability can be used for good as well as annoyance. Imreh says
she uses her memory for certain musical patterns to reinforce her
knowledge of a particular piece. Teachers too can tap into memory
reinforcement by setting their lessons to music. For example, students
who heard the preamble to the US Constitution set as the lyrics to a
catchy song remembered the words better than those who simply
read them, says Sandra Calvert, a psychologist at Georgetown
University in Washington DC.
This sort of memory enhancement may even explain the origin of
music. Before the written word could be used to record history,
people memorised it in songs, says Leon James, a psychologist at the
University of Hawaii. And music may have taken on an even more
important role. "All music has a message," he says. "This message
functions to unite society and to standardise the thought process of
people in society."
But is it true that all we have to show for centuries of cultural
evolution is pop music and a society standardised by the music of
Britney Spears? OK, maybe I'm being cynical. I'm just feeling edgy
because I keep hearing this one song over and over. I need to tell my
frontal lobe not to think about it.
Oops, I did it again.
Ben Shouse
From New Scientist magazine, vol 171 issue 2301, 28/07/2001, page
44
© Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 2001