Why do certain songs and melodies get ’hooked’ on us?

They get stuck in our brains and it is impossible to get them out. Why do certain songs stick to us?

Songs that we have to listen to over and over againIf there is one characteristic that defines the potential that music has in our lives, it is that it hooks us, it sticks to us without any kind of compassion.

It happens, of course, with many simple and catchy melodies, but even the fruits of the greatest technical virtuosity and the most complex musical pieces are capable of making us think about them all the time. Quite simply, There are melodies that remain practically tattooed in our brain. Why does this happen?

When the music does not leave our head

Some experts refer to the phenomenon of catchy music as a product of the activity of earworms.. The image of parasites nesting in our brains and laying their eggs there is rather unpleasant, but fortunately it is only a metaphor. The idea is that music enters our nervous system through our ears and once there it modifies the way in which our neurons communicate with each other, creating a dynamic similar to a loop.

Thus, it is enough that at a specific moment an external stimulus enters our brain (in this case, a melody) for its effects to be perpetuated over time, leaving behind a clear trace: our propensity to reproduce that stimulus over and over again, converted into a memory..

How does this happen? The science behind catchy melodies

A few years ago, researchers at Dartmouth College shed some light on the mystery of how it could be that our brain simulates over and over again the entrance of melody into our nervous system when our ears have already stopped registering this type of stimulus.

An experiment to recognize what happens in the brain

To do this, they conducted an experiment: they had a series of volunteers listen to music while their brains were scanned in real time to see which areas of the brain were activated more than others at any given moment.

To that end, the participants were first asked to choose a series of songs that are familiar to them and others that they have never heard, so that each person could listen to a personalized list of musical pieces. Once the volunteers had started listening to the music, the researchers included a surprise that had not been explained before: at some points, the music stopped playing for three or four seconds.

In this way, the researchers were able to prove that the part of the brain in charge of processing music-related information is the so-called auditory cortex, and that it continues to be active for three to four seconds.and that it continues to be active during those moments when the music stops as long as it is familiar, while its activity is interrupted when the music stops playing when it is unfamiliar. In other words, when the music plays, our brain fills in the blanks automatically, without us having to make an effort to do so.

A musical echo that we cannot stop

What does this tell us about the music we can't get out of our heads? First, it tells us that the mental processes we associate with the perception of sensory stimuli may go in the opposite direction to the typical one. That is, it can occur from the brain in general to areas of the nervous system specialized in processing sound patterns, since it has been proven that our encephalon can "keep singing on its own".

Secondly, this shows that external stimuli can leave a trace in our brain that, although at first we may that, although at first we may ignore them, they remain latent and can cause us to enter a loop, in the same way that stirring water with a stick can create whirlpools that remain even when we are no longer touching the water.

Neurons that press "play" automatically

If our brain is in charge of reproducing the way in which our neurons in the auditory cortex were activated when we were listening to the music coming through our ears, it will also be able to create the chain reaction that derives from this pattern of activation of several neurons coordinating with each other to process the music... which means that the necessary ingredients are mixed again so that in the future the loop appears again.

Further research is needed to find out why the loop originates, but most likely it has to do with the way in which certain stimuli create (more or less permanent) chemical bonds between neurons.