The same motive is played in your head over and over again, and you do not understand why this is happening? Don’t worry, there is a scientific explanation for this.
“Recently there was a decade of Ivan Dorn’s song “Don’t be shy” – before it sounded literally from every iron, and now it seems to have a second birth. I don’t really listen to Dorn, but my husband is a big fan. He had the track on repeat for several days, but in the end the song stuck to me – for a week now and then it pops up in my thoughts, ”our reader Veronika shared her experiences.
It turns out that she is not alone – according to research, at least about 90% of people suffer once a week due to the fact that a melody has become attached to them.
For a motive to “stick” to our consciousness, it must be simple and have a clear rhythm that would encourage us to move.
The melody is one of the main components of the hit, but in addition to it, the song also has a text, which also sometimes gets stuck in the head for a long time. Why? “The first reason is rhythm, meter and rhyme: they also create a motif that enhances the impact,” explains Olga Severskaya, candidate of philological sciences.
– The second reason is the repetition of certain fragments of the text: the beginning can be repeated in the ending, the verses are unique, and the choruses are the same, the so-called “key” words are repeated every now and then.
According to Olga Severskaya, both in the first and in the second case we are dealing with signs of a poetic form. And any element in it, be it a sound, part of a word, the word itself or several words, repeating itself, becomes significant, endowed with meaning.
However, there is a third reason – songs usually sound in the background.
If we listen to something more closely, the brain recognizes whether it likes it or not. He is ready to accept the information offered, or better not. Whereas during background listening, everything is written indiscriminately on the subcortex, and then for a long time it “has come around” to us, influencing both our thoughts and our feelings.
When attention is scattered, dominants work – sources of nervous excitability, about which the outstanding physiologist Aleksey Ukhtomsky wrote. The dominant is turned on if some important word for a particular person sounds in the song. One more thing sounds – another dominant is turned on. Together they create a certain image, and this process cannot be stopped.
Such a concept as a dominant – however, emotional and semantic – exists in linguistics. “Our emotional and semantic dominants do not necessarily coincide with those that the author of the words of the obsessive song had in mind,” explains Olga Severskaya. “But we find words in the text that are important to us and synthesize our own “song about the main thing” from them. It is also worth taking into account that the lyrics of a song, good or bad, are in any case poetry. And poetry is a terrible force!”
At one time, the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt drew attention to this. According to her, poetry, by embodying our history and experience in the word, starts the process of “conversation” and then draws us into it. So it turns out that, once again, purring a stuck song under our breath, we are talking to ourselves.
So, as Dorn sang, do not be shy! This reaction of our brain to certain melodies is absolutely normal. And if there is a strong desire to quickly get rid of the obsessive song, you can try, for example, meditation.
About expert
Olga Severskaya – Candidate of Philological Sciences, Leading Research Fellow of the IRL them. V. V. Vinogradova of the Russian Academy of Sciences, journalist of the radio “Echo of Moscow”.