Why do we get words or small phrases stuck in our heads over and over and over and over?

Question

This is different than a song being stuck in your head. It could be a single word, or the ending of a sentence, etc. Why does it happen?

In: Other

Answer 1

Your brain is criss-crossed with little fleshy wires called “neurons” that carry electricity all around to different parts of your brain that do different tasks. If your brain has to do a certain task very often, it tries to get better at it making those “neuron” wires for that task stronger and more connected.

When you decide to say something, first the words (“verbal”) part of your brain picks the right phrase, then the neurons send that information to the talking (“motor”) part of your brain. In this way, the little neuron wires between your “verbal” and “motor” parts of your brain tend to pair up and get connected really well for words that you say all the time. This can happen between other parts of your brain too.

Now, sometimes those really good strong connections go into a feedback loop, and in order to prevent your brain from getting stuck in that loop, each time it repeats your brain forces the electrical neuron wire signals to get weaker. That means, the strong connection between “verbal” and “motor” get’s weaker for a little while. This makes you feel like you are saying that word or phrase, but you can think of what it means. This is known as “semantic satiation”.

But then! ANOTHER part of your brain sometimes gets activated and sucked into the problem. It’s not really a ‘part’ of your brain, but more like a habit your brain has to want to finish tasks that it started. Your brain doesn’t want to leave a job half-done; it wants to finish. Sometimes, when “semantic satiation” is happening, your brain thinks it is an unfinished task, but it can’t finish because it can’t connect to the “verbal” part of your brain to find the meaning of the phrase. So, your brain tries to start the task over again, hoping that it can trigger those strong connection “neuron” wires by following the same pattern from the beginning. But it keeps failing and so it starts over and over again.

Now, the CRAZY thing is that this can happen completely inside your head without you ever saying it out loud.