How come our brains can convince us that we know the lyrics to a song while listening to it, when we really don’t
In: Biology
Memory usually relies on context. You see your grade 11 math teacher in class, you know who they are. You see them at the grocery store and you have no clue where you know them from.
If you’ve heard a song many times, the lyrics are familiar to you. You can sing along while the song plays because all of the context is there to cue you along. If you try singing it by yourself, you’re missing that context.
Once you know the song really well, you can start playing it through in your head and singing along that way. Otherwise, you need to put in some work memorising it.
Did you ever do one of those tests where there are obvious errors or missing text and you can read it? Brains fill in details to establish continuity and “sense” of witnessed events. That is the reason that eye-witness testimony can be very certain, detailed and yet in error.
I can’t remember lyrics for shit by themselves, but the minute the song is playing. Boom, you’d think I spent my whole life memorizing the lyrics….. Only to forget them again the minute the song ends. I truly don’t understand it
A lot of our enjoyment of music comes from accurate prediction of what comes next.
That is why we like it when downbeats happen at predictable points in time. Why we like it when melodic phrases end on the tonic. Why certain chord progressions sound incredibly pleasing to us: It is our brain rewarding us for accurate prediction.
Our brains are constantly trying to predict what comes next. When it comes to lyrics we do that mostly through a combination of rhyme and context.
When we hear the phrase “There’s a feeling I get when I look…” our brains start to fill in different ways that that sentence could end. One of those options is “to the west”, because it is both something that you can look at, and also kind of rhymes with “get”.
If it turns out that one of our predictions was correct then this causes our brain to reward itself, which gives us that satisfying experience of “knowing” the lyrics.
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