One Word, Two Ways: Repeat

Every week we select a word and each base a post off that word. This week: Repeat.

I am not sure when or where I picked this song up, but for a couple weeks now, it’s been running through my head. It’s a ridiculous song (like most that get stuck in your head) and I can’t shake it. So I figured I would share it with you and maybe it will make my brain stop playing it over and over.

“Why do songs get inextricably stuck in our heads? Experts say the culprits are earworms (or ‘ohrwurms,’ as they’re called in Germany). No, they’re not parasites that crawl into your ear and lay musical eggs in your brain, but they are parasitic in the sense that they get lodged in your head and cause a sort of ‘cognitive itch’ or ‘brain itch’ — a need for the brain to fill in the gaps in a song’s rhythm.

When we listen to a song, it triggers a part of the brain called the auditory cortex. Researchers at Dartmouth University found that when they played part of a familiar song to research subjects, the participants’ auditory cortex automatically filled in the rest — in other words, their brains kept ‘singing’ long after the song had ended…The only way to “scratch” brain itch is to repeat the song over and over in your mind. Unfortunately, like with mosquito bites, the more you scratch the more you itch, and so on until you’re stuck in an unending song cycle.”

(More of this article at How Stuff Works)