kneedeep wrote:"What song is stuck in your head today?"
This would be an excellent thread here on BookTalk...if no one beats me to it, I'll start it when I finish responding here.
I think everyone can relate to this chapter, as Sacks plainly states that no matter who we are or how musical we are, we are all vulnerable to the "brainworms"* of music. Everyone gets the Band-Aid song stuck in their heads, as Ellen Degeneres pointed out in one of her stand-up routines ("I am stuck on Band-Aid brand, cause Band-Aid's stuck on me"), and we have become so familiar with the Kit-Kat song that Sacks mentioned to the point that the company no longer even uses music to create the tune, but now has commercials in which the tune is created completely by different people crunching a Kit-Kat bar and making a delighted "ah" sound. I often wonder, when watching this commercial, how many people actually catch that that is what is happening, as my boyfriend didn't even realize that's what it was until I pointed it out to him. It's a really annoying commercial, I'd honestly rather they just sang the damn thing!
I was also amused within the first few pages of this chapter when Sacks discussed his own "brainworms," most of which being Jewish songs, and the minute I read the words "Had Gadya," which is one of the songs he talks about being a brainworm, it immediately sprang into my head, and although I haven't heard the song in probably 18 years, if not more, it played in my head as if I'd heard it yesterday and not when I was like 7 or 8. I then texted my mother, asking why we no longer sing Had Gadya at seders anymore, because I remember really enjoying the song as a child. It is a song that repeats, building on itself with each verse, always ending with the last "fourth" that Sacks was talking about, much like "There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly" or "I Bought Me A Cat," which are probably more universal examples.
(You can hear Chad Gadya here:
http://www.filestube.com/7f97a320c2daeb7d03ea/go.html.)
I think that many corporations know just how to write tunes that will "stick," as Sacks mentions, and I also think that music also helps with learning, not only with music but with any subject. I can remember pretty much anything I have ever heard, so long as it was sung. Even mneumonics like the rhyme scheme used to help us remember the numbers of days in each month has a sing-songy-ness to it so that it sticks with our brains even if we don't really know the meaning of what we're saying. There is probably a large potential for behavioral modification in music that I don't think anyone's really taken the trouble to try to tap into. I also think that music should be applied more often to teach children, especially in a time when our education systems are in desperate need of overhaul and kids need new ways to learn and retain information. I think music would be really helpful there.
I also understand his idea of the repetition of a song being pleasant until it becomes a loop. I listen to music when I go to sleep at night, and it varies from time to time, but I tend to either make one playlist full of various songs unconnected by anything but general tone, or one album of an artist, or a particular musical, and listen to that one set of music for several nights (one time I listened to Andrew Lloyd Webber's
Cats every night for almost a month, even though it's one of my least favorite musicals), because for some reason, once I find something that really works to let me have something nice to listen to but also be able to fall asleep before it finishes so I don't wake in silence, I stick with it until it stops working, meaning I either don't fall asleep at all and have to start it again or have to choose something else, or I fall asleep but wake up many times to restart the music, which means it's time to find something new. These then are stuck on loop, even in my dreams, and sometimes I'm not sure if the music was still playing when I heard it play in my dreams. Music is one of the few external influences that has the power to penetrate sleep without waking me, and to become part of my dream, and sometimes I am even aware that the music in my dream is the music playing while I'm alseep. I'm very strange when it comes to dreams. Good thing we're not discussing a book about that!
I also get parts of musicals or symphonies or ballets stuck in my head, sometimes a whole piece will finish, sometimes half a musical will finish, and sometimes it snags on one particular part of a single song, repeating it over and over until it really is almost unbearable, and no amount of musical therapy can cure it until it goes away on its own, unsnags itself, or is replaced by something else. I do have a cure for this, however, which Sacks doesn't mention and I don't know if it's something only myself and some of my friends find useful, or if it is more widely known and Sacks just doesn't cover it. The cure is very simple: If you have a song stuck in your head (assuming it is a song you like, and not a commercial jingle), the remedy is simply to physically listen to the song that is stuck in your head. This might sound counterintuitive, but it actually does work, because rather than singing itself out over and over, if you give your brain the music it seems to be craving, it seems to finally release itself into an energy that can be spent by actually physically hearing it. This isn't medically proven or anything, of course, and I'm not saying it works for everyone or even all the time, but it does work for me more often than not, and even if I have to listen to the song 100 times until I'm completely sick of it, it rids me of the song being "snagged" in my mind.
I'm overall finding this book to be much more anecdotal than I had at first expected, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. While I like that the tone is accessible and the writing easy to read, I'm kind of itching to have some more medical explanation to back up some of his statements. I'm also finding it harder to want to read this book, because no matter how interesting it is, I still cannot be drawn to non-fiction the way I am to fiction. I'm not going to abandon the discussion or anything, I just wanted to express my sense of drudgery that accompanies reading this, even though I clearly relate to and like the subject matter. I didn't want to read this tonight, I wanted to get back to
Don Quixote. No wonder I never did very well in liberal arts classes that weren't English.
*I can't help it, but every time I see the word "brainworms," I think of the cartoon series
Invader Zim, in which, Zim, an alien from the planet Irk, is trying to destroy the Earth, and in order to do so he disguises himself (very poorly) as a human child and attends school. In this very strange and morbid version of Earth, only one person realizes Zim is an alien, a paranormal investigation obsessed boy with a very large head named Dib, but because he has always been trying to prove the existence of crazy things (i.e. ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot), no one believes him, laughs at him, and calls him crazy (they also make fun of his very large head, which really isn't that much larger than everyone else's, but that makes it more hilarious). Zim doesn't have a great grasp on how humans speak, not that he doesn't speak English, but that his syntax is often awkward and he uses strange phrases to describe things. In one episode, Dib says something which offends Zim, and in response, he yells, "Have you the brainworms?!" And I crack up every time. According to Sacks, we apparently all have the brainworms.
Invader Zim on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invader_Zim
Invader Zim on YouTube:
google.com/search?q=invader+zim+episode ... CDAQqwQwAw