Mike
Carruthers:
Ever have a song get stuck in your head? It happens to almost
everyone.
Daniel J.
Levitin:
It tends not to be the whole song - it tends to be about fifteen
or twenty seconds of the song and the songs tend to be relatively
simple melodically and rhythmically. Seldom do you have somebody
running around with Mahler's Fifth in their head.
Dan Levitin,
author of the book This
is Your Brain on Music…
It's more likely
some sort of pop throwaway song like "Who Let The Dogs
Out" or "YMCA" by the Village People. And these
songs have been described as kind of a cognitive itch and the
way you scratch it is by playing them over and over in your
head.
Everyone has
their own favorite song or favorite music. And interestingly…
People tend to
report that their favorite music comes from their early teen
years and there's a neural basis for this. The primary mission
of the brain until about the age of sixteen is to form as many
new connections as possible, but after that the mission of the
brain shifts to prune out unneeded connections. So, it's not
that you can't learn anything new when you get older but things
that you've learned as a child become embedded. So, we tend
as adults to want to listen to that music or music that sounds
like it.
And music can
impact us in other interesting ways, says David.
We do know that
it can help people to withstand pain better than without. And
music helps athletes - athletes all the time report that they
can run a little farther or work out a little harder if they've
got music helping push them along.
Tomorrow, why
some songs trigger old memories - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's
Something You Should Know.
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