How do we “hear” things in our heads, like when recalling a certain song?
In: Biology
Many of the same parts of the brain are used to hear sound **and** recall a sound.
This answer is woefully incomplete, like my own knowledge of the subject, so here’s hoping others help you gain a better understanding!
Not a scientist in this particular field, but here’s my understanding. Your brain works a bit like a big archiving system with lots of drawers. Every item gets its own drawer. So every time you hear a song, your brain opens that drawer and adds new information to that drawer – like how you feel while listening, or an intricate drum pattern you hadn’t noticed before. However, you don’t need audio cues to open your drawer of this song, coming across the title or band name can do the trick as well. Your brain opens the drawer, plays a part of it in your head and gives you some associations. The funny thing is: you can only hear it in your head in the way you saved it while listening to it. So if you were more focused on the lyrics, that’s likely what you hear in your head, but if you were more focused on the treble and base, you’ll be hearing them. You are just hearing the echo of it like you saved it earlier, not the original version.
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