User:Netmonger/Sandbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- http://www.rediff.com/news/2006/nov/27inter.htm
- http://www.tamilnation.org/intframe/india/98dixit.htm#1._On_Indira_Gandhi_and_Indias_Motivations_in_1983
- http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/DC16Df02.html
- http://bewley.virtualave.net/bukhari49.html
My current time is 14:33 (GMT+5:30)
The term "earworm" is a translation of the German word Ohrwurm, used to describe the "musical itch" of the brain. It is a confusing term, since the phenomenon has nothing to do with small maggot-like creatures crawling into your ear and laying eggs in your brain. The musical earworm actually works more like a virus, attaching itself to a host and keeping itself alive by feeding off the host's memory.
The American philosopher Kenneth Burke once asked: "When a bit of talking is taking place, just what is doing the talking?" Researchers discovered that the talking is done by the auditory cortex, which perceives and stores our auditory memories. And it is the auditory cortex - the "brain's iPod" - that earworms chose as the centre of their activity. At first, the researchers asked the study's 15 students to identify which songs were familiar or unfamiliar to them, thus developing an individualised playlist for each subject. The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction and the Beatles' Yellow Submarine were included among familiar songs with lyrics, and Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the theme from The Pink Panther among familiar instrumental tunes.
"When the subjects were in the MRI scanner, which we used to look at the brain activity, we played them parts of a song and then hit a mute button for three or five seconds," stated David Kraemer, a graduate student of cognitive science and the lead researcher on the Dartmouth study. "We didn't tell them that we were going to cut out the sound. For songs people were familiar with, they automatically put the missing part in there." The auditory cortex continued "singing". When listening to an unfamiliar song, the subjects didn't hear anything after the sound stopped.
One of the subjects of the study said that with familiar songs it was as if "the brain was connecting the dots. You are not surprised when the song picks up, because you have been playing it all along in your head. With unfamiliar songs though, you either wait in silence or, if it's predictable enough, you make up the missing bits." After leaving the scanner, she noticed that the songs were spontaneously popping up in her head for quite a while. What triggers the retrieval of a particular song - making it come to mind and get stuck in the head - is not exactly known. It might be anything: a title, a thought or a reminder of past experience that somehow is connected to a melody. Or it could just be a few notes that prompt the brain to refresh the memory and find the missing parts of the song.
Most of the time we do not pay much attention to our earworms - every moment of the day we are bombarded with fresh auditory information, so we are constantly distracted from concentrating on them. Still, people react differently to this stuck-song syndrome: women are more susceptible to earworms than men. And musicians more than non-musicians.
Some people swear by 'eraser tunes’; those that have a mystical ability to eat any other earworms. Singing the eraser tune rids one of an earworm but risks replacing it with the eraser song. You can also pass earworms on to someone else - sharing it certainly lightens things up. Or if a song is stuck because you can't remember some of the words or how it ends, then listening to it or singing it in its entirety may help unstick it. Perhaps we simply have to remember the main rule of the human-earworm relationship: treated earworms go away in one day, untreated earworms in 24 hours.
Some day scientists will be able to find a vaccine for earworm infections. Apparently, 1% of people are immune to this disease.
[edit] Test templates here -->>
|
Archive 1 |
