I find it incredibly interesting how certain tunes get stuck in our heads. Usually, it seems that an intense emotion is involved, of extreme like or dislike, although enough repetitions can have the same effect also. The problem comes when you're trying to concentrate on homework or something and you can't hear anything but the song. Or when you can only remember one line. Such a fascinating subject though!

I agree, it is a fascinating subject.

I have found that as I grow older the "brainworms" happen less often.

When I was a kid they happened all the time. But, I discovered a cure. Every time a lyric got stuck in my head I sang silently to myself the first verse of "Home on the Range." I often had to sing it more than once but it always worked. The brainworm was vanquished.

Sacks mentions this "cure" but pretty much dismisses it by saying it doesn't work for everyone.

In my brain, "Home on the Range would just replace whatever I was trying to get rid of. My head has a soundtrack all the time....the trick is in liking the song that is playing.

"What song is stuck in your head today?" is a regular, joking query between several of my associates at work. Announcing "sticky songs" occasionally causes an exchange between participants, and we've all confessed to searching the radio for a good song to get stuck on just before our day begins.

This would be an excellent thread here on BookTalk...if no one beats me to it, I'll start it when I finish responding here.

I think everyone can relate to this chapter, as Sacks plainly states that no matter who we are or how musical we are, we are all vulnerable to the "brainworms"* of music. Everyone gets the Band-Aid song stuck in their heads, as Ellen Degeneres pointed out in one of her stand-up routines ("I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, cause Band-Aid's stuck on me"), and we have become so familiar with the Kit-Kat song that Sacks mentioned to the point that the company no longer even uses music to create the tune, but now has commercials in which the tune is created completely by different people crunching a Kit-Kat bar and making a delighted "ah" sound. I often wonder, when watching this commercial, how many people actually catch that that is what is happening, as my boyfriend didn't even realize that's what it was until I pointed it out to him. It's a really annoying commercial, I'd honestly rather they just sang the damn thing!

I was also amused within the first few pages of this chapter when Sacks discussed his own "brainworms," most of which being Jewish songs, and the minute I read the words "Had Gadya," which is one of the songs he talks about being a brainworm, it immediately sprang into my head, and although I haven't heard the song in probably 18 years, if not more, it played in my head as if I'd heard it yesterday and not when I was like 7 or 8. I then texted my mother, asking why we no longer sing Had Gadya at seders anymore, because I remember really enjoying the song as a child. It is a song that repeats, building on itself with each verse, always ending with the last "fourth" that Sacks was talking about, much like "There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly" or "I Bought Me A Cat," which are probably more universal examples.
(You can hear Chad Gadya here: http://www.filestube.com/7f97a320c2daeb7d03ea/go.html.)

I think that many corporations know just how to write tunes that will "stick," as Sacks mentions, and I also think that music also helps with learning, not only with music but with any subject. I can remember pretty much anything I have ever heard, so long as it was sung. Even mneumonics like the rhyme scheme used to help us remember the numbers of days in each month has a sing-songy-ness to it so that it sticks with our brains even if we don't really know the meaning of what we're saying. There is probably a large potential for behavioral modification in music that I don't think anyone's really taken the trouble to try to tap into. I also think that music should be applied more often to teach children, especially in a time when our education systems are in desperate need of overhaul and kids need new ways to learn and retain information. I think music would be really helpful there.

I also understand his idea of the repetition of a song being pleasant until it becomes a loop. I listen to music when I go to sleep at night, and it varies from time to time, but I tend to either make one playlist full of various songs unconnected by anything but general tone, or one album of an artist, or a particular musical, and listen to that one set of music for several nights (one time I listened to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats every night for almost a month, even though it's one of my least favorite musicals), because for some reason, once I find something that really works to let me have something nice to listen to but also be able to fall asleep before it finishes so I don't wake in silence, I stick with it until it stops working, meaning I either don't fall asleep at all and have to start it again or have to choose something else, or I fall asleep but wake up many times to restart the music, which means it's time to find something new. These then are stuck on loop, even in my dreams, and sometimes I'm not sure if the music was still playing when I heard it play in my dreams. Music is one of the few external influences that has the power to penetrate sleep without waking me, and to become part of my dream, and sometimes I am even aware that the music in my dream is the music playing while I'm alseep. I'm very strange when it comes to dreams. Good thing we're not discussing a book about that!

I also get parts of musicals or symphonies or ballets stuck in my head, sometimes a whole piece will finish, sometimes half a musical will finish, and sometimes it snags on one particular part of a single song, repeating it over and over until it really is almost unbearable, and no amount of musical therapy can cure it until it goes away on its own, unsnags itself, or is replaced by something else. I do have a cure for this, however, which Sacks doesn't mention and I don't know if it's something only myself and some of my friends find useful, or if it is more widely known and Sacks just doesn't cover it. The cure is very simple: If you have a song stuck in your head (assuming it is a song you like, and not a commercial jingle), the remedy is simply to physically listen to the song that is stuck in your head. This might sound counterintuitive, but it actually does work, because rather than singing itself out over and over, if you give your brain the music it seems to be craving, it seems to finally release itself into an energy that can be spent by actually physically hearing it. This isn't medically proven or anything, of course, and I'm not saying it works for everyone or even all the time, but it does work for me more often than not, and even if I have to listen to the song 100 times until I'm completely sick of it, it rids me of the song being "snagged" in my mind.

I'm overall finding this book to be much more anecdotal than I had at first expected, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. While I like that the tone is accessible and the writing easy to read, I'm kind of itching to have some more medical explanation to back up some of his statements. I'm also finding it harder to want to read this book, because no matter how interesting it is, I still cannot be drawn to non-fiction the way I am to fiction. I'm not going to abandon the discussion or anything, I just wanted to express my sense of drudgery that accompanies reading this, even though I clearly relate to and like the subject matter. I didn't want to read this tonight, I wanted to get back to Don Quixote. No wonder I never did very well in liberal arts classes that weren't English.











*I can't help it, but every time I see the word "brainworms," I think of the cartoon series Invader Zim, in which, Zim, an alien from the planet Irk, is trying to destroy the Earth, and in order to do so he disguises himself (very poorly) as a human child and attends school. In this very strange and morbid version of Earth, only one person realizes Zim is an alien, a paranormal investigation obsessed boy with a very large head named Dib, but because he has always been trying to prove the existence of crazy things (i.e. ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot), no one believes him, laughs at him, and calls him crazy (they also make fun of his very large head, which really isn't that much larger than everyone else's, but that makes it more hilarious). Zim doesn't have a great grasp on how humans speak, not that he doesn't speak English, but that his syntax is often awkward and he uses strange phrases to describe things. In one episode, Dib says something which offends Zim, and in response, he yells, "Have you the brainworms?!" And I crack up every time. According to Sacks, we apparently all have the brainworms.

Invader Zim on Wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_Zim
Invader Zim on YouTube:google.com/search?q=invader+zim+episode ... CDAQqwQwAw

I created the "What song is stuck in your head today?" thread. It's in the Arts and Entertainment and Fun Stuff forum.

Once or twice a year I am subjected to musical hell. I have to go to Annapolis Maryland and work in a lab across the Severn River from the Naval Academy for about 7 to 10 days. The lab is manned by three very nice guys that happen to love country western. They have a very good stereo receiver and good quality speakers strategically located through out the lab. They listen to WPOC 93.1 Baltimore's place for country! And that is all they listen to. So here is the poster boy for "silence is golden" spending 7 to 10 days, 10 to 14 hours a day listening to WPOC played at a volume level I find a little louder than comfortable. Considering the list of indignities that one must endure to earn a simple wage, I suppose that having to listen to WPOC non stop for a week hardly qualifies as an unfair labor practice, yet, I feel I should get hazardous duty pay.

First there is the morning DJ. She took speech lessons off of Reba McEntire, except that Reba McEntire only speaks 10% Reba and this DJ speaks 100% Reba--finger nails on a chalk board!

Then of course there is the music. A little country goes a long, long, way with me. A lot of country especially played over and over and over and over and over and over...well you get the idea. Then there are the commercials. They too are played over and over. A few years ago, the commercial of choice was for Empire Flooring. There was some gaggy choral group singing Empire's telephone number once every three minutes. I can assure of one thing, if I ever need flooring, it will not be Empire even if they are giving it away. That stupid tune for that telephone number bored into my mind and I heard it in the shower, woke up with it playing in my head, and was a constant companion for several days after I left. I supplanted it with Empire's Pittsburgh competition "Ring a ding ding, give Roth a ring...." which is far more catchy and that would work for a while then soon " 1 800..." would drift back in my mind.

For the most part, I can somewhat tune it out--one has to or one would go crazy. However, if something turns to crap and I start having problems with the job, I notice that the music gets louder and louder and louder. There have been times when I went outside just to stop and think without having a my ole pickup truck, a fishin' rod, drinkin' beer out of mason jars, God, and blue skies skewer through my thoughts. If I am reviewing data, I have to wear earplugs, but that only dampens the din and maybe I don't hear the idiotic lyrics but those lovely steel guitars still seep through. Pure hell.

One time after a particularly obnoxious song, I bitched about the damned music and one of the guys at lab overheard me. So he asked, what kind of music do you like. I replied that I prefer silence, but if we have to listen to something classical would be acceptable. So they put on the local classical station. The first selection was harp solos. Forty five minutes of non-stop harp music. I thought I had died and was on a cloud. If that is heaven, give me hell! Then the next selection was a violin concerto, I can't remember which one, but I am not sure whether the composer was trying to destroy the violin or the drive the listener to jump off a bridge. It sounded as though the violinist was trying to commit suicide with a violin. It was terrible! I looked at these country western guys with the hope that they were suffering at least a little bit...no reaction. It was like nothing was on, they just went about their jobs unconcerned. I finally couldn't take it any longer and asked them to put the stupid country back on--while they may play fiddles, at least they don't destroy the damn things.

Usually when I am on a long drive, I will listen to one of my CDs that I like. I find it relaxing and it helps to pass the miles along. Quite often on the drive home from Annapolis, I will drive back in silence...beautiful, wonderful, golden silence!

I got back to Musicophilla. I was fascinated with Sachs claim the reading eegs caused him to see them on the wall after a while. Back in the early day of home computing, I used to do a lot of programming on a Commodore Vic 20 and Commodore 64. Those old timers used TV sets for a monitor and had extremely poor resolution. I had a small 13 inch color set that I used with the computers. After a couple hours of working with the computer through the TV, my eyes would develop an odd adaption. The TV image looked fine. Everything else was extremely grainy or dot matrixy as though viewing it with a poor resolution TV monitor. My eyes would be screwed up for about a half after working with the computer. If I closed my eyes and stared at the sun or bright light, the image would be composed a zilllion red dots.

In this chapter the word “hook” struck me. I recently had the opportunity to sit in at a recording studio on Sunset Blvd in LA. A team of musicians was busy creating pop songs for pop stars. The singer-songwriter came up with the lyrics and melody and everybody was most interested in the “hook” for the song. This is the first time I heard the word “hook” used this way. In a previous life I always thought of it as the refrain. This team had created a few recent hits and I wonder, how does a “hook” get into the singer-songwriter’s head and the team found it “catchy” to the point where they were confident it would be a hit. I would also sit there and think: yes, this is it. And that in turn ends up in people’s heads, sometimes to detriment as previously described here.

As Blues Traveler sings in the chorus of one of their songs, "The hook brings you back, on that you can rely."

And true to form, that song is now stuck in my head.