Friday, November 11, 2011

The Science of Earworms, or Why You Can’t Get that Damn Song Out of Your Head

Link: The Science of Earworms, or Why You Can’t Get that Damn Song Out of Your Head

They go by many names: Brain worms, sticky music (thanks Oliver Sacks), cognitive itch, stuck song syndrome. But the most common (if also the most repugnant) is earworms, a literal translation from Ohrwurm, a term used to describe the phenomenon (and perhaps bring to mind an immediate association with  corn earworms). If you’re an academic, you might refer to it as Involuntary Musical Imagery, which, of course, gets condensed to INMI.

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