I photographed this older orangutan yesterday at the St. Louis Zoo. He had moved slowly to this spot about 50 feet away from the glass, where he paused for several minutes and stared back at the humans who were staring at him. I was pondering whether this photo needed a caption, but…
[E]ven though people are spending as much time in their cars as they used to, consumers have been turning off music stations in droves. 27 per cent since 2001, I believe, about on par with the declines of CD sales. You would think this means people are just listening to…
This morning I tried to visit a site called OLGA (on-line guitar archive), a place where I had often gone in past years to check out chord progressions for pop/rock tunes. Many guitarists had worked out tunes as best they could, then posted them at this site. Over the years,…
Here's a good question: why can't a woman go topless wherever a man can? Sorry . . . I'm not buying answers like "Because that is the way it has always been" or "Because they are women." Talk about equal rights! The prevalent dress code inequity is motivated by the…
I might owe some people an apology.
I recently posted about a song from “Scrubs the Musical,” a television episode that aired a few weeks ago. The title of this tune is presumably “Everything comes Down to Poo.” It is a clever and funny tune, but it is also dangerous.
For me (hopefully not for you) that song morphed into an “earworm,” another name for a song that can get stuck in one’s head. This crazy tune from Scrubs has been following me around relentlessly for the past two weeks. It has sometimes been distractingly annoying during the day. It even kept me awake one night last week.
What to do? I just happen to be reading a cogsci/music book: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. Here’s what I learned from Levitin: There is relatively little scientific work done on the topic of earworms. What is clear is that
musicians are more likely to have ear worm attacks than non-musicians, and . . . people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms—in some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects.
Hmmm . . . This makes me wonder whether Walgreens carries any over-the-counter medications for OCD . . .
Levitin suggests that the neural circuits representing a song somehow get stuck in “playback” mode, but usually only a small fragment of a song (15 to 30 seconds) is involved. Ear worms are most likely “simple songs and commercial jingles.”…
