What actually happens in the brain when a song gets “stuck in your head”? Why can’t we control that one specific part and why can’t we choose which ones get stuck?
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I would love to tell you but damn BYE BYE BYE by NSYNC has been stuck in my head since I saw Deadpool last week
Your brain builds neural “pathways” around things you do all the time. It’s how we learn skills, form habits, and if you listen to a song enough times, it’s how you learn a song. All these things end up with a web of other associations, things you were doing at the time you were building up those pathways in your head.
And if someone nudges your train of thought, you can fall right back into that pathway, and end up with the song stuck in your head. And the more you try not to think about it, the more you’re actually thinking about it. You try to get a different song stuck in your head, but you know you’re doing it because you don’t want the first THERE IT IS AGAIN.
We don’t really know, but music cognition scientists think it may have something to do with the role of expectation in the way we listen to music. Here’s a short video by a music theorist specializing in cognition who teaches at Princeton (it’s really an ad for a longer TED talk):
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