Last night I had a song “stuck in my head” for hours. It was there, palpable, as if there was a radio right next to me. Obviously that wasn’t the case, but how do we “hear” these memories?
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Our perceptions come from our brain. Yes, there are real stimuli that exist in the outside world, but those stimuli are picked up by our organs (like our ears for instance), travel through our nerves, and are processed in our brains. The brain is where our experience is. Being able to visualize or audiate something that’s not there is a function of this fact. You have a memory of what it sounds like, and your brain can do a pretty good job of recreating the experience of it. The parts of your brain that process sound are still lighting up in similar ways.
The truth is that this is an area of ongoing research. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how this works, but it is sort of like replaying how your brain responded to hearing them in the first place. But that is a gross simplification. When you hear a sound, parts of your brain react to it. When you listen to a song in your head, your brain might be making those reactions again.
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Oh boy the fact that I can usually replay a song in my head almost perfectly is amazing. For the songs that I really like and listen to often, it’s basically having internal headphones on in my brain.
Ongoing research. I’d say most probable cause being that it’s not only about how the music is received through the prefrontol cortex and other regions but also the physical geometry of the stored information. If the geometry fits a specific pattern (the ongoing research) the song represents a contextual anxiety reduction.
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