What are the psychological aspects, if any, surrounding the phenomemon of a song getting stuck in a person’s head?
ya gotta scratch that brain itch
I was going to say that I had read somewhere that it was to do with the brain trying to complete unresolved scales/melodies… but I see that AV8R has not only beaten me to it, but found the right link too!
In music biz parlance it’s called a ‘hook’. It’s designed to make $$$.
That “brain itch” article said that musicians are more susceptible to this phenomenon. I consider myself a musician (electric guitar) and I never suffered from this “I can’t get this song out of my head” syndrome. I always thought that musicians would be less susceptible to it. My reasoning is that there’s a lot of songs, melodies, chord patterns, scales, etc “sloshing around” in my brain so that 1 song will easily replace another that is “playing” in my head.
I am not a scientist, but have often wondered if this is related to how speech was formed. I think it is a learning process. Birds will play and replay certain songs, as will whales. I keep thinking that this is how we learned shared sounds before we learned speech. But it is just a thought.