Ever have a melody play over and over in your mind all day and you can’t get ride of it? I think most of us have had that experience many times over.
Here is an explanation of that phenomenon by Daniel Levitin, author of “This Is Your Brain On Music”:
You said that “music sticks in the head,” and in fact I’ve turned off the Stones but I can still hear Mick going “oooh” in my brain. Why do songs get lodged in there like that?
Maybe it’s meant to get stuck in your head. Having “music in the head” allows you to experiment with variations. A lot of people report that when a song gets stuck in their head, the tempo will change a little, or the notes will. So it could be a kind of a game for exercising the mind. When a song gets stuck, it’s not the whole thing; it’s usually about 20 seconds of it. That’s about the same length as auditory short-term memory. And the songs tend to be relatively simple ones. It’s more likely Rihanna that’s in there and not Stravinsky or Mahler.