Sometimes we can’t get rid of them for hours – a song, a jingle, a movie tune … Experts suggest we don’t get too annoyed: annoying motives can be the key to deciphering our feelings.
And it is absolutely impossible to get rid of it! It seems that we heard it by chance, just a couple of times: in the store, in the car, on the run … And we even noted to ourselves: “What a stupid song!” And suddenly, after a while, we realize that it is endlessly spinning in my head. This phenomenon has a name: earworm – earworm. A dissonant term perfectly describes our condition: an obsessive melody is like a parasite that has firmly settled in the brain and from which there is no escape. James Kellaris, a psychologist at the University of Cincinnati (USA), claims that only 1% of people in the world are lucky in this sense. The remaining 99% are doomed: 73,7% endlessly sing lines from songs; repeat meaningless advertising jingles 18,6%; whistle melodies without words 7,7%*.
Everyone interprets in their own way. And yet why do I sing for days on end a line by an unknown artist: “You left me, you left me …”? Musicologist Peter Szendy is sure that we are captivated by repetitive and unpretentious motifs. “The brain works like an echo – it reflects what has been heard many times.” Philosopher Santiago Espinosa explains: “Music is a strange connection of sounds among themselves, a special untranslatable language. It does not have a single and understandable interpretation for everyone. Everyone interprets it how they want. The same principle applies to words: the most affectionate – as a rule, and the most obscure, muddy, meaningless. “When we hum, the principle of free association works,” says psychoanalyst Edith Lecourt. Melodies that spin in the head for hours open the way to the unconscious and can help us understand ourselves a little better. So, at the end of the dinner, having heard the word “rain” in the lively rumble around, we can involuntarily recall Zemfira’s “London rain” and immediately switch our thoughts to buying her finally released album. Or, to the same accompaniment, we can focus on dessert… A colleague refused: she went on a diet… By the way, spring began, but exactly a year ago, at this time… Listening to these unconscious internal interweavings, paying attention to the discrepancy between a seemingly good mood and sad melody, “we come across something very interesting,” says Edith Lecourt, “that deciphers our feelings, gives a signal: we are not what we seem. And the music that passes through us points to it.”
* More details on the university website – uc.edu/news/kellaris.htm