From “Discover Magazine”:
“Why do songs get stuck in our heads? James Kellaris, consumer psychologist at the University of Cincinnati replies:
‘Having a song, tune, or commercial jingle stuck in one’s head is a phenomenon known as having an earworm. Most people have had an earworm at one time. The experience is harmless and unrelated to both obsessive-compulsive disorder and endomusia, the hearing of music that is not really there. Certain songs – simple, repetitive, or oddly incongruous – have properties that act as mental mosquito bites in that they produce a cognitive “itch”. The condition also arises when people struggle to remember forgotten lyrics or how a song ends. To scratch a cognitive itch, the brain repeats the song, which then traps the hapless victim in a repeated cycle of itching and scratching. Everyone has his or her own list of demon tunes that haunt. Earworms occur more often among women, musicians, and individuals who tend to worry. Earworms also vary across situations, striking when people are tired or under stress. How can you make an earworm go away? Think of something else or actually listening to the song in question are thought to help, but there is presently no research evidence showing what works best. Fortunately, most episodes eventually dissipate on their own.’”
My current holiday earworms are:
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, everywhere you go.”
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.”
“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock ……..”
There was this young lady from the audience at a pick-up gig I was doing with some friends who enthusiastically (politespeak for “beerily”) asked us if we could do “Oh, Danny Boy” for her. By way of encouraging us she sang it to “Oh, Holy Night”. That was in August. Talk bout Christmas earworms.
I pretty much always have some song running through my head, and lately, yes, a lot of them have been Christmas ones. Right now, it’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (technically not really a Christmas song I suppose) because I just heard a version on the radio that was sung by Rod Stewart and Dolly Parton. Now it’s stuck in my head.
I suspect there’s been some research done in the field of neural network processing systems. The phenomenon of self-sustaining patterns in trained neural nets is well documented - the standard way to collapse them is to train them with a similar patern that has an exit.
For instance - I once had the star wars “dearth-vader theme” pestering me - I was able to kill it with the sound of music “Spoonful of sugar” which has the same rhythm scheme, but changes the key and has a definite terminus.
I still use that hybrid as a musical joke;
dum dum dum dum-de dum dum-de dum (Dearth Vader theme)
dum dum dum dum-de dum dum-de dum
didle-dum de-de + “medicine goes down” (DV Theme with imposed lyrics - same notes)
didle diddle dum de-de “the medicine goes down”
“in the most delightful way” (DV theme completely killed)
All day , rolling around in my head,I’ve had the tenor(my) part of the Gloria we’ll be attempting tomorrow night at church…et interra pax, pax hominibus..etc.
At work we had a world-famous x-ray optics guy visit us a few weeks ago. He’s retired, and it turns out he’s also an enthusiastic Irish fiddler. We were asking him about some things, and he said, “One thing you’ve got to realize is that every tune you learn drives something useful from your memory.”
So, Barry, I guess you need to ask yourself whether it’s more important to have useful stuff or tunes in your head.
I keep misreading the title of this thread as “do you have a Christmas earthworm” and now I’ve got this mental image of a worm with a little red and green bow and a Santa hat on him stuck in my head.
