IMAGINE having songs 'stuck' in your head ALL THE TIME:
Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.
It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales.
"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like that ever since."
Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my lifetime," said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into another one, and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be quite honest."
Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St. Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his experience: musical hallucinations.
MUSICAL HALLUCINATIONS! WOW, imagine living out your old age being forced to explore your cerebral jukebox 24/7! I can imagine that getting pretty annoying, but I wonder if it's ever kind of cool, like I bet from time to time he picks up some pretty good songs he'd totally forgotten about. Anywayz, as is often the case with this kind of stuff, this extreme case is shedding some light on normal brain functioning -
Dr. Aziz believes that people tend to hear songs they have heard repeatedly or that are emotionally significant to them. "There is a meaning behind these things," he said.
His study also shows that these hallucinations are different from the auditory hallucinations of people with schizophrenia. Such people often hear inner voices. Patients like Mr. King hear only music.
The results support recent work by neuroscientists indicating that our brains use special networks of neurons to perceive music. When sounds first enter the brain, they activate a region near the ears called the primary auditory cortex that starts processing sounds at their most basic level. The auditory cortex then passes on signals of its own to other regions, which can recognize more complex features of music, like rhythm, key changes and melody...
Dr. Griffiths discovered a network of regions in the brain that became more active as the hallucinations became more intense. "What strikes me is that you see a very similar pattern in normal people who are listening to music," he said.
The main difference is that musical hallucinations don't activate the primary auditory cortex, the first stop for sound in the brain. When Dr. Griffith's subjects hallucinated, they used only the parts of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds into complex music.
These music-processing regions may be continually looking for signals in the brain that they can interpret, Dr. Griffiths suggested. When no sound is coming from the ears, the brain may still generate occasional, random impulses that the music-processing regions interpret as sound. They then try to match these impulses to memories of music, turning a few notes into a familiar melody.
For most people, these spontaneous signals may produce nothing more than a song that is hard to get out of the head. But the constant stream of information coming in from the ears suppresses the false music.
"What we're seeing is an amplification of a normal mechanism that's in everyone," Dr. Griffiths said.
So that's what that is! The article mentions that some composers of yore (Robert Schumann, channelling Schubert) suffered from musical hallucinations, and I totally GET it - you engage in really similar mental processes when you play an instrument or otherwise try to imagine music. When I 'write' parts (not that I ever actually 'write' any of that bullshit music down), I just kind of put my fingers on the keys somewhere that 'feels' good, and then the simple sound of those first idle notes kind of grows instantly into a more complex musical figure, faster than any conscious thought could do it - you just kind of take that little germ of sound (or that germ of sound from the guys you're jamming with, or from inside your brain, or from wherever) and run it through the algorithms of your musical memory and generate full-fledged songlets from it. Musical hallucinations = musical imagination GONE WILD.