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Like most pieces of neuroscience writing that frame a "why" question ("Why we sleep", "why we get earworms", "why we like beaches") - the question is literally
by TaupeRanger 1y ago
Like most pieces of neuroscience writing that frame a "why" question ("Why we sleep", "why we get earworms", "why we like beaches") - the question is literally never answered in the article/book, and the explanations given are things that an 8 year old child could produce. This is, of course, because we have no idea how the brain works to create the complex experiences that we are so familiar with.
Almost all of the explanations here boil down to descriptions of the earworms themselves, rather than an answer to WHY we get them. There are some things about short term memory and the "phonological loop" peppered in to make it sound scientific, but again those just boil down to "it's a short melody that you can hold in your memory". But of course, even after all this, none of these things are actually explanations at all! They are post hoc observations masquerading as explanations, like trying to explain "why" birds migrate by describing how long they fly, and what direction they fly in.
- momocowcow 1y agoFor a moment I thought I was reading the companion article to «I let Claude Code write an entire book»
- anton-c 1y agoAs a producer lemme tell you i can create some pretty bad melodies than get stuck in my head cuz I heard em too many times. I'm not sure how well earworms can be dissected beyond music theory. I also had a therapist suggest that the music stuck in my head(smth is going almost always) reflected my mental state. There could be some truth but also think this overplays a psychological connection. Sometimes I just listened to "hold the line" and it gets stuck. I'm not actually strugglin'.
- cnity 1y agoThis is probably my biggest pet peeve in all of pop-science. It often feels like the _vast_ majority of pop-science explanations fall into this category of non-explanation. Watching popular TV shows (say, QI in the UK) about scientific or knowledge based topics can be a real drag if you're actually a highly curious person.
- perlgeek 1y agoThe answer to "why?" is really just "Evolution". It's not satisfying at all, but for example sleep could have been an evolutionary accident that happened to have enough upsides and little enough downsides that it persisted. As such, it could really be like the article described that it's kinda of a mis-feature of some other neurological mechanism, and the downsides weren't big enough to be selected against. There may also be an upside, I recently came across a study that claimed that participants that had a song stuck in their head for a longer time were more likely to hit the correct pitch when singing it. Not sure how that would translate to selective advantage though, if at all...