My Internal Jukebox And Other Related Phenomena

Like many people (I hope, because otherwise it means I might be insane), I often have music playing inside my head. It may be a favourite song, or the theme tune from a movie, or it may be a catchy but usually irritating chorus from some TV ad.

I’ve often stopped to wonder, though, why specific songs or tunes are selected by what appears to be some form of internal jukebox (like an organic version of an iPod Shuffle – a recently discontinued MP3 player made by Apple).

Sometimes, it may be a song I’ve not heard for over 20 or 30 years, and, as far as I can tell, not anything I’ve even thought about recently.

Occasionally, the song may play for only an hour or two before it disappears or is replaced by a different song, but then again, it may play for literally days at a time. I might go to sleep with it playing, and it’s still there when I wake up, and it’s there throughout the day too.

And the even weirder thing is that, sometimes, after having had a single song stuck in my head for many hours (or longer), when it’s replaced by a different song, I find I am no longer able to recall the song that was previously there. By this, I mean I know which song it was, but I cannot summon up the sound of it at all, no matter how hard I try.

Somewhat related to this are those times when I start tapping a tune using my fingers, but it takes me a few seconds to work out what the song is – like my fingers are choosing which song to tap before my brain even knows about it.

I accept that one of the features of the human brain that still makes it so much more powerful than most computers is its amazing ability to make connections, often between the five senses – for example, a taste may trigger a memory of a totally different experience. (Note that this is not the same as synaesthesia, which is where some people – about 5% – experience things using multiple senses at the same time, such as “seeing” the colours of numbers.)

And on those (frequent) occasions when I detect that my mind has been wandering, I sometimes play a game I call “How Did I Get There?”

If you’ve never tried to backtrack to work out how you ended up thinking about whatever you’re thinking about now, following each connection one after the other to uncover the original thought in that chain, then it’s an interesting and often frustrating exercise.

But it does illustrate perfectly the way that the human mind can form these associations between apparently unconnected events and experiences.

(It’s also why using multiple senses to learn new information can be a powerful technique.)

Anyway, I digress (again).

Even more spooky is that occasionally, like one night I recall, I had a song playing in my head that I’d not heard for many, many years (Born To Be Wild, in this instance), and then only a few hours later, I heard that very song in a movie I was watching (and, no, it wasn’t Easy Rider – it was Hotel For Dogs).

Is it coincidence, or is there something else going on?

I’m aware of the cognitive bias known as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, sometimes known as the frequency illusion, but that’s usually when you start noticing, for example, other cars of the same colour or model as yours, because you just bought a new one with those features.

But this is different I think – especially because in the case I just mentioned, the song was playing in my head, and it was my wife who chose which movie to watch.

And why is it that the tunes and jingles you often can’t get out of your head, sometimes for days at a time in my case, are the most irritating ones that you don’t even like?

And on a vaguely related note, I sometimes have what amount to single-frame images in my head of places I’ve been, either recently, or more usually, years ago. Like the music, these often have no obvious connection to anything I’m doing or thinking about at the time.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is highly unusual for me because I am one of those people who suffer from aphantasia – the inability to see things in your “mind’s eye”.

So, what is the purpose of all this?

Is it my brain trying to tell me something, or is it the random firings of neurons deep inside my brain, and if so, is this normal or do I have a few loose wires short-circuiting from time to time?

And how will I ever know, for certain, what’s going on in there?

And why, again on a similar but different note, do I sometimes find myself repeating somebody’s name inside my head for day after day? Once, it was Carlos Alazraqui (a comedian that I had seen on TV shortly beforehand), and previously to that, Tippi Hedren (and I hadn’t seen her in a movie since I saw The Birds back in the mid-1970s when I was at school, some 30 years prior to when I couldn’t get her name out of my head).

Am I suffering from some form of celebrity Tourette’s Syndrome, or am I just plain nuts?

All these questions, and no answers!

The brain works, like God (or so they say), in mysterious ways – I’m just glad that Microsoft didn’t create the software that drives our brains (aka wetware) or we’d all be pressing CTRL / ALT / DELETE every other day to do a reboot (although I do know a few people who seem to experience the human equivalent of the BSOD on a regular basis)!