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aggasalk t1_iunrxzf wrote

Reply to comment by mjbat7 in Why do we get "ear worms" (music or sounds stuck in one's mind playing on repeat) but not for the other senses? by MoiJaimeLesCrepes

but then why don't we just-as-easily get spoken phrases as earworms? on your explanation, you'd think it would be just as common to have a line of shakespeare or a piece of poetry or something lodged in your mind's ear, but it really just happens with music.

i think there's something special here that has to do with music specifically. dunno what that is.

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floridagar t1_iuow94g wrote

That does happen to me all the time. I get phrases, unusual people's names, bits of dialogue and whatnot stuck in my head all the time and I just end up repeating them sometimes for hours.

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Local_Quantum_Magic t1_iup4i2a wrote

Happens to me too, specially weird-sounding words or words in a language I'm trying to learn and is very different from the others I know (Portuguese/English vs German/Japanese). I might wake-up and already remember and have the word stuck throughout the day...

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aggasalk t1_iuq4qul wrote

there's an old concept from cognitive psychology called the 'phonological loop', the idea is that this is a mechanism that we all use in memorizing things - something is put in phrase form of a certain (short) length, and just rotates through this audio-imagery buffer in order to force it into long-term memory (or, at least, to conserve it in short-term memory until we need it). sounds kind of like that to me..

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