Google, why do I think in song lyrics?

No matter how much time I spend pre-planning, the actual preparation for a trip gets crammed into the last few hours before departure. During the recent holiday period, I was running critical errands on the morning we were due to leave for a short stay at a beach house. While struggling to maintain the frenetic pace, I noticed that my mind started cycling through random song lyrics. I reflected later that this happens all the time: during brief periods of wakefulness overnight, when I’m doing something solitary that’s tedious and finicky (e.g., setting up a beach dome), or as I’m hurriedly making my way to a meeting I’m late for. Not to mention recurrent periods of aimless mind wandering. My default mode network seems to have a soundtrack. I was curious enough to do a Google search (“Why do I always think in song lyrics?”), which revealed that I’m not alone. Perhaps there’s some general human process at work here beyond my own idiosyncratic experience.

Some exposition of that idiosyncratic experience before attempting generalisation: it’s usually a short sequence of lyrics (not necessarily the most aurally memorable ones – rarely the chorus), on a continuous loop, in my own voice. The lyrics play out much like a subset of thoughts from my inner monologue. I’m not sure how much this overlaps with the so-called earworm phenomenon, where catchy tunes (e.g., pop songs, ad jingles) get stuck in our heads. Often it’s snatches of a seldom-heard album track. It’s not Tom Waits’ voice but mine that I hear singing, “The Piano has been Drinking,” when I’m half asleep at 3:43am on a Tuesday. I spent most of my mid-teens to early thirties writing, rehearsing, recording and performing songs. So sometimes, the lyrics I hear in my mind are my own. But this occurs with no more frequency or intention, and no less randomness, than it does with other peoples’ songs. The overall qualitative experience ranges from benign distraction to a pleasant stroll down memory lane. Curiosity about whether other peoples’ experiences of this phenomenon were similar to my own is what inspired that lazy literature search.

This does seem to be a dimension of typical human behaviour (i.e., some of us do it a little, some of us do it a lot, we’re all on the continuum somewhere). I’m among those for whom the experience is neutral or fun, but a significant minority of people find it disturbing. Stuck Song Syndrome is an extreme manifestation of this where people fear, and struggle to move past, songs getting stuck in their head so much that it negatively impacts their daily functioning. So what differentiates those of us who either enjoy or are not bothered by songs getting stuck in our heads, and those who find it disturbing and even disabling? As is often the case with complex psychological phenomena, it’s an open empirical question to which the answer is, “We don’t know, but we have some ideas.” There is evidence that people with OCD may be more likely to find the experience of getting songs stuck in their heads psychologically threatening. The stereotype of OCD is someone who spends a lot of time washing their hands, or checking various sources of perceived threat (e.g. stove top, locks, asymmetry). An aspect of OCD that is sometimes overlooked is the intrusive thought process, i.e. the obsessions that gives rise to such stereotyped compulsions. Many people with OCD find it extremely difficult to relate to their thoughts as random mental events that need not necessarily have significance attached to them (as an aside, developing such a relationship to our thoughts is known to be helpful). Compulsive behaviour may be viewed as a control strategy: doing something to ‘get rid of’ the obsessed-over thoughts. For someone with an anxious-avoidant attachment to their thoughts, getting a song stuck in one’s head may be akin to such obsessions (i.e., a source of psychological distress).

For those of us who have a more benign experience of songs getting stuck in our head, what might the function of this behaviour be? In my above-described holiday experience, it felt like a cognitive hamster wheel for my mind to spin off nervous energy in a neutral-to-pleasant way. There seemed to be something specifically functional about the repetition: some forms of repetitive thought are adaptive (e.g., as mental stimulation that helps us achieve practical goals). That was certainly the case when lyrics were looping through my mind as I frenetically prepared for the road trip. But why was it the opening verse to Nas’s “The World is Yours” revolving in my mind? It could’ve been a calming mantra, or some concrete, task-relevant, repetitive thought (e.g., “Fuel, air in the tyres, coffee… fuel, air in the tyres, coffee”). At a general level this might be an evolutionary quirk related to our pre-historic affinity for oral forms, which need to be aurally appealing so as to be memorable. The non-written bardic storytelling tradition is probably an adaptive elaboration on this quirk. Related effects are still very much evident in contemporary human behaviour. When two words are linked by rhyme, we tend to remember them better than non-rhyming words. On a personal level, almost twenty years of song writing is sure to have shaped some aspects of my cognitive functioning. One example may be the overlearned behaviour of holding lyrics in mind and repeating existing lyrics until new ones are added. I’m not sure if this resonates with other people who have spent much of their lives writing songs, but I would be very interested to know.