Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 23, 1992 TAG: 9201220187
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE BRAIN HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN
Q: Why do songs like "The Candy Man" and "Kung Fu Fighting" get stuck in your head, until finally you want to throw yourself off a bridge?A: Or "My Ding-a-Ling" by Chuck Berry.
Or "Frosty the Snowman" by Burl Ives.
Or "We Love to Fly and It Shows" by Delta Air Lines.
These are auditory viruses. They invade the system and resist the brain's normal antibodies. They can strike anytime, anywhere. One second you are a normal, intelligent person, and the next, you hear yourself singing, "Who can make the sun riiiise . . ."
And you can't stop! Your body has been seized by the spirit of Sammy Davis Jr.!
". . . the Candy Man can!"
We have two thoughts on this, and together they may add up to something like an actual answer:
1. Humans are prone to addiction. The pleasure centers in the brain seize on something they like, and they are loath to let go. "It seems there's almost a tendency for the brain to become addicted to pleasurable pastimes, whatever they may be," said Dan Alkon, director of the Neural Systems Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health.
But you might argue that the paradox here is that "The Candy Man" doesn't, in fact, make you happy. It can drive you mad. This brings us to:
2. Your brain does what it wants. You have less free will than you suppose. We like to think that everything we do, and everything we think, is the product of our own volition. Not so. The brain is enjoying "The Candy Man" it will hum that tune to itself unless you find a way to interrupt the proceedings. (The brain doesn't have bad taste, exactly; you also get "good" songs stuck there, they just don't annoy you as much.)
That song is stuck there for a reason. It's serving a function, not a malfunction. It's making the brain happy. What would you rather your brain be doing? Weighing the politics of the West Bank and Gaza? Calculating differential equations?
"Those songs persist in your head because they constitute a satisfying state of affairs for you," said Isidore Gormezano, an experimental psychologist at the University of Iowa.
He said one reason some people have obsessive-compulsive disorders, such as washing their hands 100 times a day, is that they are trying to eradicate disturbing thoughts that are stuck in their head. They may suffer recurring imagery of snakes, for example. "The only way they break it," he said, "is to engage in compulsive behaviors that break their thought processes."
\ Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.