Why do songs get stuck in head even if we want to forget it? At times i sleep with a song stuck and wake up with same song playing in head the moment I get up. Why does this happen?
In: Biology
It’s a combination of the way your brain works/psychoacoustics.
Human ears are extremely well developed and quite good at hearing very specific frequencies and formants that are located within the normal frequencies of human speech. This has a clear evolutionary advantage for obvious reasons. Now add to that the fact that our brain is just a pattern recognition machine, e we have working auditory memory that functions in many ways like a computer. Have you ever been speaking with someone and when they first speak, you don’t hear/understand what they said, but before they can repeat themselves, it suddenly registers? What actually happens is your brain basically rewinds that piece of frequency content information and plays it back for you without you even realizing it happens. Some people are better at this than others, I.e. musicians.
I would honestly compare it to kind of a day dream. Kinda like how dreams don’t make sense, and sometimes involve memories mixed up with random occurrences. Something most likely triggered the memory of that song, or it was buried somewhere in that giant filing cabinet that is in your head. Memory, like dreaming, is still not completely understood.
Edit: And the reason that many songs/certain melodies are so catchy is just because the frequency information (notes) are related to each other in ratios that are psychologically satisfying.
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