Do Songs Get Stuck in Your Head?
An introduction to observing mental processes
Do songs ever get stuck inside your head?* Some studies suggest as many as 98 percent of us experience the phenomenon, making it virtually universal. The songs apparently last longer for women, if you’re curious, and tend to irritate them more.
I find it particularly annoying when one specific melodic phrase gets stuck, especially if there’s a bit of a lyric associated with it, repeating endlessly in my head like some mad personal jingle.
I do not, unfortunately, have any way to make those songs (which are sometimes called earworms) stop, but, assuming song fragments do get stuck inside your head and not just in mine, I have a question:
Do you ever think those songs are you?
Probably not.
Even though my stuck-song fragments often contain words, just like my thoughts do, they somehow feel separate from my sense of self.
I never find myself getting lost within the words playing in a stuck-song fragment, for example, but I do tend to get lost in my thoughts, and often.
Which seems odd, if you think about it.
What, exactly, is the difference?
Maybe there isn’t much difference at all. Maybe, for some strange reason, when we hear songs in our heads, we’ve learned to experience the songs as somehow external to ourselves—but when we hear thoughts in our heads, we’ve learned to experience those thoughts as internal.
As “us” or as “true.”
What if you could experience your thoughts in the same way you experience songs?
That might be useful!
The next time you hear a song playing in your head, try to notice it. Notice it, and notice that you’re noticing it—that you’re hearing it as if it were coming from somewhere else. Notice the distance, such as it is, between the song and you.
Think of the song—whatever it is—as some sort of “mental process” running inside your head. Within you, yes, but somehow not the same as you, the person listening to it.
Our goal, moving forward, is to try to apply this distancing/observing technique not just to songs playing in our heads, but also to thoughts playing within our minds.
We want to learn to experience thoughts in much the same way we regard the occasional song that gets stuck in our heads—as a sort of mostly-harmless background muzak that is often best ignored.
*if songs don’t get stuck in your head, don’t worry — we will find other things for you to notice!