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?
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Really should have stopped scrolling before I got to the “maybe you have ADHD or some other mental aberration” portion of the proceedings. I’m a singer and very often get ear worms…one time I had “All About that Bass” stuck in my head for a week and seriously considered checking myself into a hospital because it was making me cry by that point. But as far as words, I often have conversations and arguments in my head while getting ready for work in the morning, and weirdly it’s the tail end of those conversations that will sometimes get stuck in my head and go round and round for a while before they dissipate.
Simplifying hugely: it’s probably because there’s a bit of our memory called the **phonological loop** that can store 1-2 seconds of audio.
Psychologist Alan Baddeley found this via some brilliant experiments getting children to memorise sequences of numbers. It turns out that Welsh-speaking children can memorise shorter strings than English-speaking children, while Chinese-speaking children can memorise longer strings. That’s because pronounced Welsh digits are on average longer than English digits, and Chinese digits are on average shorter. In all cases they could memorise what they could say in two seconds or so.
See https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100422 for a non ELI5!
I always wondered this because for about 5 years my brain would repeat “potato” when there was nothing else on my mind .
Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.
Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.
I never get words stuck on my head… music on the other hand, is an absolute nightmare. If a song is catchy, it’ll get stuck immediately.
I’ve learned to live with music constantly playing in my head, and I consider it my own personal radio. I can even change the song by remembering another catchy one and it gets stuck until I replace it.
Everyone who relates to this: go to r/ADHD to read some first-person accounts of what ADHD is like. I had no idea I had it because people think “it’s just issues with focus and attention” and don’t know that there’s a zillion other ways it affects your life. It’s much deeper than that and this is one of the things that’s common with ADHD and doesn’t make sense to most people without it. You might find a whoooole lot more that you have in common with ADHD people if you go to that sub, and you might have so much in common you get diagnosed and medicated (like me), changing your life for the better.
I feel like I’ve had the fancy dude from the supercalafragalisticexpialidosis song in Mary Poppins saying “indubitably” in my head any time I agree with something for the last 20 yrs.
Babushka. This damn word is stuck in my head now because the trending post before this one has a babushka standing beside a bike. Babushka..
Does this happen to anyone else to a MUCH STRONGER, insanity-producing degree when they’re sick or have a fever? Or is my brain just fucked?
Extremely late to the party, but anybody here ever seen the horror movie Pontypool? It’s really good and unique, and about this exact thing. Go watch, but it’s a little hard to find.
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