Unless you have never listened to music, there is no doubt in my mind that at some point in your life a song has infiltrated your brain. A little ear worm nestling itself in the depths of your ear canal humming continuously and banging rhythmically on your ear drum. Imagine that, a little worm, dressed in a tuxedo, or MC Hammer pants, jiving away to a song so incessantly it feels you have lost control of your ability to think clearly. Over and over, all you can hear is that lyric, that beat, that section, that build up until you cannot take it any longer. You give in, just one more hit you tell yourself. So you jump on Spotify, set repeat and before you know it you have driven to Margaret River listening to nothing but the same song, over and over, for three straight hours (I’ve never done that). All this does is further cement that song getting stuck in your head and the cycle continues. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
What does it even mean?
Saturation eventually kicks in. Couple that with the pleas from your loved ones to stop playing the song and singing the same lyrics over and over (because despite the repetitive listening you still do not know all the lyrics, or even what they mean). With as much willpower as you can muster, you do your best to avoid the song completely. But the universe conspires against you. Suddenly, every radio station is simultaneously playing the same song. So, you stop listening to the radio. You get to the shops, and the song comes on over the loudspeaker. Next, you stop shopping. At the beach, checking the surf, a guy on a repco mountain bike rides past with his boombox blaring. It’s that fucking song. You reach breaking point, praying to the gods to regain control of your own mind and forget that song ever existed.
From seventy thousand to naught
It is bizarre when you think about it. Before hearing that, no longer glorious song, life was simpler. You were free and in control of your thinking. Now all that is going through your head are the lyrics to a song, over and over like a monkey with a miniature cymbal. It is easy to see why having a song stuck in your head might be frustrating. But I beg to differ. Maybe for the first time in a while, your thinking has stopped. Thanks to that song, your mind may be clearer than what it has been for some time. Let me throw some facts at you. The number of thoughts we have each (and every) day is in the order of 70,000 – no don’t quote me on that, I recall hearing it somewhere. Of those 70,000 thoughts, how many do you think are unique to that day alone? Not many to be honest. Most are simply, unprofoundly, the same thought repeated over and over. Like a tape on repeat, we (or I) constantly remind ourselves of the things we have or have not yet done. 70,000 thoughts per day, many of them mundane and repetitive, and occasionally some of them weird and whacky enough to make you scratch you head and ask yourself, where the fuck did that idea come from? As you can tell, most of my thinking is bizarre and frankly weird – that is only what I have committed to put down on paper. Do not despair, I am not going to open Pandora’s Box. So many thoughts, so many ideas. Yet it is all based on repetition, habit, and routine thinking.
The brain is a radio
From this lens, getting a song stuck in our head is a welcome reprieve. We slow down. Suddenly we forget what we were thinking about as the words to a song, completely removed from the present situation enters our head (it has been many years since I was a teenage dirtbag). So, I ask you, did you ever think you were not in control of your thinking? Sure, you did not actively ask for that song to become stuck in your head, but enough repetition of listening and it becomes automatic. The fact of noticing, the song in your head, well, that is in effect noticing your thoughts and thinking. What happens when you notice the song? A brain explosion. Simultaneously you notice you are thinking about thinking about the song, whilst playing the song in your head. Your head becomes a radio, simply repeating back to us those tunes which we play the most.
Time to change the station
If a song can do that, imagine what repeat thinking can do. How does that shape the way we move through life every day? Say for example, all you think about is running or exercising, I bet you are eventually going to give in and go for a run. Of course, some thinking will be immediately boycotted by your sub-conscious moral reasoning (if you have that) but other things could be planted in your brain. I am not talking about being hypnotised, or am I? How do you know you have not already been hypnotised? It happens every time you turn on the radio, TV, go on facebook, Instagram, youtube, read the newspaper or elect to read some crack-pot’s personal blog about nothing in particular, that promises nothing and gives even less? Wait, have I used that line before? What is the point of all this? Take some time, to notice the song in your head, and if you don’t like it, change the radio.