Tuesday, December 09, 2025
The Song Stuck in Your Head
My whole life I have had songs that just get stuck in my head. Most persistent (and horrifyingly), the song "Hot Crossed Buns" often goes on a loop in there and I can't do anything about it. Plus, only one verse is on repeat, so it becomes like a mosquito in my ear.
Today, it was this song that got stuck in there:
I'm not sure why, since I probably have only heard it a few times (I don't spend a lot of time listening to "Lite Regular" on the radio).
Science people at Harvard believe that these songs may get lodged in there because they are tied to specific memories and emotions:
There’s involvement of the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain that supports musical perception, and connections between that cortex and deep temporal-lobe areas, like the hippocampus or parahippocampal gyrus, that are important in memory encoding and retrieval. The phonological loop has been implicated — the process of holding something in your mind, like a mental scratchpad, for a certain number of seconds. So there are networks in the brain that support these functions of music — and memory, and attention, and keeping something in your head, and working memory. And then there’s the connection to the emotional regions of the brain, like the amygdala, which is involved in salience and negative emotion, and the ventral striatum, or nucleus accumbens, which is involved with positive emotion and reward. These are all elements that are thought to be involved in earworms.
What happens is that connections in our brains involving these regions get “stuck,” resulting in an automatic playing out of musical memories.
If that's true, why is it frigging "Hot Crossed Buns" that is tied to some memory or emotion?!?
