JITOTM40: Earworms & Oddities
Remember earworms? Of course you do - that's the problem. Earworms are those little phrases of songs that you just can't get out of your head. There's not a whole lot of research out there on earworms, but some findings suggest that unusual rhythms and odd melodic twists - like lack of resolution - may make them more memorable.
That's how it works with audio cues, anyway. We've talked about them before. But what about visual memories? And smells, tastes, and touch sensations? Is there such a thing as an "eyeworm?"
We have no clue... But come on in, the speculation's fine in this week's episode of JITOTM, Earworms and Other Oddities.
posted by David Newland at 8:17 PM
10 Comments:
I remember slime, goop, that kind of thing as a children’s toy, don’t think this is the exact one advertised when I was a kid in the 70's-80's, but it was like this kind of stuff - Putty/Slime
4:20 AM
oopse
Putty/Slime
4:21 AM
I think your discussion of earworms is very interesting. This kind of thing may be a key to a lot of what goes on in our minds.
I have noticed that when a song is “playing in my head” I can pay attention to something else and when I notice the song again, it has continued to play on its own, as it were. It doesn’t pick up where I left it. IT has continued to play without ME. As though I walked out of a room where a record was playing and returned after a minute. The song has continued to play even though I wasn’t there.
This is perhaps analogous to a “process” on a computer, which can continue its job independently of other processes that may be going on, or what one sees on the monitor. Sometimes I think that there is *always* a musical process going on in my head, even if it may just be a rhythm or a melodic fragment. My mother used to whistle absentmindedly sometimes – always an interval of a perfect 4th, strangely. She was completely unaware that she did this. Perhaps her whistling was just a window into something that was going on beneath the surface of her conscious awareness – or parallel to it.
Perhaps there are many such independent processes. Could it be, for instance, that we are dreaming all the time? That the “dream movie” is always playing, processing events in some dreamlike fashion, and that while we are awake we are simply not paying attention to it? That when we sleep we enter the “dream theatre” – where the show is already playing, has been playing all day long?
And what about the stream of words that we normally identify with, that we think is who we are? Perhaps that too is just a process that is always going on, that we pay attention to or don’t pay attention to, depending on what other stimuli are around us. Perhaps that voice continues to process events in its own way even when we aren’t listening to it.
And who is this “Me” that “pays attention” to these various processes? Perhaps, as the Buddhists say, there is no such thing. There are just a lot of independent processes which in turn become “Me” as “my” attention flits between them. A soundtrack Me. A dream Me. A verbal Me. All equally Me, or none of them Me, depending on how you look at it.
-Dan Gibbons
St. Louis
2:02 PM
I think I found your nose worm...
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic was the Wham-O brand name for a 1970s and 1980s children's toy consisting of a tube of a viscous plastic substance and a thin straw used to blow semi-solid bubbles. A pea-sized amount of liquid plastic was squirted from the tube and made into a tiny ball. One end of the straw was then inserted into the ball, and the user would blow into the other end, inflating the plastic into a bubble. The bubble could then be removed from the straw by pinching the hole closed, sealing the air inside.
The size of each bubble depended on the amount of plastic used. Roughly the consistency of bubblegum, the bubbles formed were much more durable than simple soap bubbles, and could be gently manipulated to make different shapes, and stacked to make simple figures such as snowmen. Much less durable than actual balloons, however, they could pop easily if overinflated or handled with too much force.
Chemically, the bubbles contained polyvinyl acetate dissolved in acetone, with plastic fortifiers added. The acetone evaporated upon bubble inflation leaving behind a solid plastic film. [1]
Besides the obvious potential for messes when letting children play with liquid plastic, the substance also emitted noxious fumes. The fumes could become concentrated inside the straw, so users had to be careful never to inhale through the straw while inflating their balloons. Because of these problems, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic was eventually taken off the market. The toy is often cited by Generation X-ers as an example of simple and inexpensive toys that have disappeared due to over-protective legislation and corporate fears of lawsuits by parents. Other similar brands remain available in certain countries, such as Malaysia, Mexico, and Germany.
9:18 PM
I found some "Plastic Bubbles" on Ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/Plastic-Bubbles-Blow-w-Straw-Classic-Toy-Bright-Colors_W0QQitemZ190076660622QQcmdZViewItem
9:34 PM
I'm not crazy after all... thanks Les for the fantastic info.
Dan - your comments would make excellent fodder for a future podcast. Keep your ears tuned.
2:55 PM
I know some people whose parents live int he Philippines...and they brought back these bubbles, which were still legal overseas at the time.
The smell was so strong and horid, and all for the satisfaction of making rubber-ish bubbles.
Dave, the first person I met at last year's Podcasters Across Borders, is not crazy, indeed. They exist, and I've played with them within the last 10 years.
Been listening to JITOTM since PAB 2006, and I only wish they came out more often.
Tom Lucier
Shane and Tom's Squeezebox Podcast
2:07 PM
I also remember that bubble stuff... I'll spare you further links though.
as for earworms, a trick i learned once for getting rid of an earworm was to hum or sing a few bars of Jobim's "Girl from Ipanema." This works for me. It has the effect of displacing the earworm, and then, somehow, not becoming an earworm itself.
If you're taking questions again at some point, I'd be interested in hearing what you guys have to say about the placebo effect. Are there studies that try to enhance the placebo effect, rather than use the placebo as a control?
I remember being very disappointed when it came out that Echinacea didn't perform better than a placebo. I wished I hadn't heard about the study, because my belief was shattered and now I can't even get the minor health benefits I got from fooling myself.
thanks for the podcast.
-aaron.
oakland.
4:27 PM
Here's an interesting thing I've noticed concerning how audio cues get implanted in your mind:
I often listen to podcast, audio books, and the like while I'm out walking. Sometimes I want to listen to a certain part over again later.
I've found that when I listen to parts of the audio over again, it often brings up a clear memory of exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard that audio.
And the stuff that I associate with it isn't all that interesting really. It's just "Oh, when I first heard him say this I was walking up to the grocery store!".
It seems like the most useless thing to remember, yet somehow my mind makes the connection.
I thought you guys would be interested in that.
5:02 PM
Podcast #40 is my favourite episode yet. There were just so many great ideas discussed!
I agree that, at least in my case, the same ideas run over and over and over in my head, kind of like an earworm: discussions rehashed and expanded, dialog rehearsed, and so on. This doesn't necessarily mean the ideas are well-formed after the process. Sometimes I try to communicate an idea to someone else, that I've worked over thousands of times in my head, only to find out that when I verbalize it, my explanation is pathetic. Someone once said, "Writing is nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is". The thing is, because I've gone over the idea so many times in my head, I'm completely convinced it's rock solid, even if it's objectively weak.
For the most part, I wouldn't say that earworms pop up unbidden. In my experience, they 'get stuck' in my head, usually after I've listened to a song, and stay for a few hours or days, but don't arrive of their own accord.
I'm not sure that smells are strongly associated with memory. I have smelled things that caused me to recall memories (in particular, creosote reminds me of pilings at the marina and railroad ties), but it's not like the smell thrusts me into a memory like Harry Potter's penseive. My theory is that you smell a familar odor, aren't sure where you smelled it before, and so you have to think about it quite a bit to recall the earlier situation. In a visual situation, it's obvious where you saw the thing previously, so you don't have to think about it. That means you consciously notice the odor-stimulated memory more than visual- or aural-stimulated memory. The rest is confirmation bias; counting the hits and ignoring the misses.
5:47 PM
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