Earworms

Now that this article is already published, I don't feel like I'm screwing myself out of any kind of rights when I post it here. 

Enjoy.

You know that one song? That one song that gets stuck in your head for hours, days, weeks? Or maybe it’s just one stanza or a verse, or even just a couple of notes? Repeating ad nauseam, running in dizzy circles around and around your ears, driving you absolutely bananas by the end of hour 493?

You, my friend, have an earworm. Besides being consummately irritating, earworms are a real psychological phenomenon that has been studied by various important sciencey folk. No, really, it has. The term, a literal translation of the German Ohrwurm, was made popular by a marketing professor called James Kellaris. His studies showed that approximately 98% of people have experienced an earworm.

Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, musician and record producer, also delved into the study of earworms. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between neurocognition and music, and he is the author of This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. He has also worked with artists and groups such as Steely Dan, Santana, The Grateful Dead, The Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Wonder and Chris Isaak.

If that isn’t enough for you, the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks also researched earworms in his 2007 book Musicophilia, contributing the title “involuntary musical imagery” to the list of earworm synonyms.

Some other fun synonyms are “humsickness”, “repetunitis”, “sticky tune”, “brain itch”, and my personal favorite, “tune wedgie”.

So how do people get earworms (hereafter called tune wedgies)? According to Kellaris and Levitin, any song can become a tune wedgie. But there are some characteristics that make a song particularly prone to worming into your ear. Songs that are simple (lyrically and musically), repetitive, and contain some unusual feature (like an extra beat) are most likely to become tune wedgies. Some people (musicians and those who are chronically stressed, tired, neurotic) are more prone to getting tune wedgies than others. This, says Kellaris, indicates that they are the result of a complex interaction between musical (and lyrical) properties and an individual’s traits.

Okay, you say. I’m one of those lucky people who get tune wedgies all the time. So how did it get there? More importantly, how do I get rid of it?

Patience, young Padawan.

When you listen to a song, a part of your brain called the auditory cortex is activated. The same area is reactivated when you just imagine hearing the song. This retrieval of auditory input—whether it’s a tune wedgie or not— can be called “perception in reverse”, because it follows the same neural path as actually hearing a song, but backwards. This mirror-image of activity, Kellaris believes, is part of why tune wedgies get stuck so deeply.

The first and most common way to get a tune wedgie is simply hearing a song. This will trigger the auditory cortex and boom, insta-wedgie. But it doesn’t have to be an entire song. Often, it’s just a stanza, a line or even just a few notes. But once that wedgie digs in, it takes days of picking to get it out.

The second way is subliminal, or lyrical, exposure. This happens when you read a word—any word—and it reminds you of a song lyric. Which turns into a tune wedgie. Some good examples include “stop” (in the name of love), “one” (is the loneliest number), “blue” (da ba dee da ba di), and “never” (gonna give you up, never gonna let you down).

Got a wedgie yet?

I wish I could tell you to hang upside down from the archway of a cemetery gate while eating strawberry yogurt and twirling your feet in circles and your tune wedgie will go away, 100% Guaranteed Or Your Money Back. I wish I could say that because it would be hilarious to see, but also because we all want that one real tune wedgie cure. But sad to say, there is no tried and true way to cure a tune wedgie. Each one has its own cause and came to you for its own reason, so a panacea is, unfortunately, out of the question.

But there are some things that you could try, and I swear I am not making any of this up:

·         Eat hot cinnamon candy. The intense flavor evidently distracts your brain.

·         Listen to the song all the way through. Once.

·         Listen to another song or album from another artist.

·         Distract yourself by physical activity, like skydiving. But beware, the wedgie may return once the adrenaline wears off. This goes for less death-defying activities too.

·         Drink alcohol (works like a charm).

·         Pass it on—sing your tune wedgie to a friend. Beware: they may become an ex-friend when they walk away humming it.

·         Play music; piano seems to work best.

·         Go to the Eiffel Tower. According to earwurm.com, nobody has ever reported having a tune wedgie on this structure. And because I found it on the internet, you know it’s true.

·         Listen to “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees.                    

If your tune wedgie endures, despair not. It will go away in time. If it does not, however, you may have a condition called endomusia, wherein the sufferer actually hears music that is not there. Endomusia is related to obsessive-compulsive disorder in that it is a type of persistent, recurring thought. It is also classified as a type of hallucination in that the auditory cortex is activated as it is when one actually hears music, not in the perception-in-reverse way that results in tune wedgies.

If you are interested in learning more about tune wedgies and various other intersections of music and psychology, I recommend grabbing a copy of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, 2007) or This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin (Dutton, 2006). Or you could check out earwurm.com, which has resources to help you identify and get rid of those pesky wedgies.

Happy picking!

"Look at me while I am talking at you", or "Thanksgiving III"

Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday.  In no particular order the reasons for this are:
1) the food.  Okay, this one was in order.
2) it’s a chance to collect one’s family in one place and spend the day (or weekend) talking and catching up.
3) #2 could be done at Christmas, but the joyous thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s free of the stress of Christmas.  You don’t have to participate in Black Friday if you don’t want to, but everyone feels compelled to participate in the Christmas tradition of gift-giving.  Christmas has become, in Garrett’s words, Capitalistmas.  No matter how much individual people may emphasize family or joy or God in Christmas, the general theme of Christmas is “give/get presents.”  What is the first question anyone asks you after “How was your holiday?”  “What’d you get?”  Right?

Before you bark about the sordid history of Thanksgiving and all the Indians that the English slaughtered to make it that far, consider this.  All folk (not just us Americans, though we’re really good at it) alter or forget their history, especially related to holidays.  With each passing year, another coat of sugar gets slathered onto the memory until the event itself is a lump of shapeless goo.  To make an overly complicated example to prove my point, look up St. Valentine on Wikipedia.  Nobody knows who he was, or how many St. Valentines there were (yes, there were more than one).  Nobody knows why or how they were martyred, and not even the Romans were sure where the first St. Valentine was buried.  Then look at the stuff between then and now.  Nobody can agree on how we got from a gaggle of Roman saints to a holiday about chocolates, red hearts and obligatory sex.  To offer another example, think about Christmas.  We all know how it started out.  No, not the part about Jesus, the part further back than that.  The pagan part.  Between then and now dozens of date changes, rewrites, additions (hello Santa Claus) and alterations have changed Christmas so profoundly that when I tell you that for many years Protestants vehemently and violently opposed the celebration of Christmas, you will think it at the least a bit bizarre and run off to Wikipedia to see if I’m telling you the truth.

I am by no means advocating for abolishment of Christmas or Valentine’s Day or even a return to their roots; I’m merely making the point that it’s implausible and downright silly to think too hard about any holiday based on a historical event or a dead person.  If you try to include the entire span of a holiday’s history in your observation of it, you will inevitably do or say things that completely contradict one another.  That’s why some people celebrate Christmas as the birth of Jesus, some celebrate it as a day to get and give a whole bunch of stuff, some celebrate it not as a Christian holiday but as the winter solstice, or yet again as a pagan feast and party, but never as all those things at the same time.

But I digest.  I was talking about Thanksgiving in New Jersey.  I met Garrett’s very Jewish grandmother about whom I will only say this: the stereotypes are true.  I felt like speaking in a Southern drawl just to save my own ears from the increasingly twitch-inducing dialects Garrett’s family issued forth.  Don’t get me wrong; they’re wonderful people.  They just need to learn how to talk right.

Since New Brunswick was only an hour away, we decided to zip up to Rutgers on Saturday to spend a while with the Brothers of Pi Chapter of MBPsi.  We played football (which devolved into a silly string battle– only at Pi), had an official meeting, played the Jewish version of Apples to Apples (an automatic win if you can't pronounce the word you play), and were just about to take part in the most lavish and plentiful Thanksgiving bounty I have ever seen (there were about 30 people packed into a 4-person apartment), but Garrett needed to get home to get up early for work the next morning, and Oswego is a good 5 hours from north Jersey.

That was definitely the most memorable Thanksgiving I’ve had to date.  I love my family with all my heart, but there’s not much can compete with being captive audience to a 75-year-old Jew wife for eight hours, getting nearly run off the road three times on residential streets, playing Jewish Apples to Apples with two Jews until 5a.m., and running around an entire apartment complex with two cans of silly string participating in a mass regression to early childhood. 

This is why I’ve decided that holidays are worth it again.

Revenge of the Golgothan

Day Six: Tide rising.  So is the smell.  Prudence is telling me to go over to someone's house to shower, but I am just too lazy.  Going in.  Tell my boyfriend I love him.


Day Seven: Found out Upstairs Dude's toilet is connected to our shower.  Gurgling sounds invaded my dreams.  Still haven't reached the landlord.  Working up a good righteous anger for next call.


Day Eight:  Three Brothers are spending the weekend in our house.  Wondering if I should prepare them for the Septic Apocalypse or just Noah's Flood.  God help us all.


If I had kept a journal of the events at our apartment over the past week and a half, it would have looked like this.  We've had problems with our septic system since we moved in; most of you know some of it.  In response to Garrett's and my first notice of the perpetual puddle on the floor of the basement, the previous tenant and the landlord both assured us it was a leak from outside and that it was not serious.  Turns out, though, the water through which I was treading to get to the washer and the dryer was not rainwater.

I was changing the laundry one evening and I heard water rushing; the septic pipes run against the wall in the basement.  What I did not expect was a gush of water to spill out of a gaping four-inch hole in the main line right onto the table and floor.  I was struck dumb for a moment, then, almost dropping the armload of clothes I had, I flew up the stairs and drug Garrett down to see.  Yes indeed, boys and girls, everything from our bathroom and Upstairs Dude's bathroom was pouring down this one pipe and onto our basement floor.

This all began a little less than two weeks ago.  After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the landlord, I took matters into my own hands and called a plumber that despite his blazingly colorful language (even for a plumber), patched the hole well. 

Please note that the house in which Garrett and I live is very likely more than twice my age.  The pipes, then, have had about fifty years to get corroded and clogged.  Not a day after Ken the Cussing Plumber patched the yawning hole in the main line, I discovered a lesser leak.  It could wait a day.  Then, the toilet stopped flushing properly.  But with tough love from a plunger and choice words from yours truly, it accepted its lot.  That could wait a day too.  That night, I was awoken by violent and prolonged gurgling sounds coming from our shower drain.  These were caused by the flushing toilet from upstairs.  That could even wait.  The next morning, I discovered that our shower no longer drained and that our bathroom sink leaked.

That could not wait a day.

But it had to, because the next day was Saturday.  To throw some sprinkles on this pile of shit, Garrett and I had invited three Psi Brothers to spend the next two nights at our house, in addition to hosting a large party for the Brotherhood on Saturday night.

Everyone is well, so we don't have to worry about another apocalypse until 2012.  It got hairy for a few minutes during the party; since there was only one plunger, Garrett and I took turns jousting with the toilet.  Evidently it felt it was getting the rotten end of this whole deal.  I couldn't completely blame it until it gurgled irritably at one of the Brothers and freaked her out.  She hasn't used our toilet since then.

This morning I called the Ken the WonderPlumber and bless his jaded soul, he put off a few other calls for us.  He and his slack-jawed young assistant spent about an hour clanking around in our basement, cussing and roto-rooting our toilet (the hole in the floor to be exact; they had taken the toilet off its pipe).  The results according to Ken the Hero of the People: a three-year-old had assembled the plumbing in the entire house.  Tree roots had complicated the problem.  Ken had patched, unclogged and unrooted to the best of his ability, but the problem would never really be solved until the all the pipes were replaced. 

Let me take this moment to say how happy I am that I do not own this house.

Let me also take this moment to say how not forward I am looking to cleaning up the shitwater lake from our basement floor.  Anybody think Garrett could pull off a Moses move?

Some other beginning's blah blah blah

It's not official for the DMV, the bank, the insurance company or even for me yet, but all my stuff is here, so I officially live in New York.

I feel I must make one outstanding, pervading, overarching observation that I am sure will blow apart every preconceived notion any of you have ever had about the state of New York; this observation may even change your lives with the meteoral impact of the great weight of the information it carries:

IT'S COLD.

Let me allow that mind-numbing wealth of information to set in.

Okay, you think you can go on now?

The hilarious part is that it's not even winter, and it's not even that cold, but it's WINDY. Oswego is a port town, right on Lake Ontario, and my house is, quite literally and God I wish I was kidding, two blocks from the water. So take steady 20-25mph winds that will only get stronger as the season goes on, add clouds and rain that have been around since I arrived, throw in regular Oswego fall temperatures of 55 degrees or so, and for spice sprinkle on a Carolina girl who hasn't unpacked any of her winter clothes yet.

Speaking of rain, it was raining when I left North Carolina; it rained for the two days that my mother and I were on the road; it rained when we got here, and lo and behold it's still raining. We saw the sun yesterday for about two hours. I asked Garrett if it's always like this, and he blinked. "I did tell you, didn't I, that they call Oswego 'the land of the steel sky'?"

"...oh. Guess you did."

But if the weather isn't smiling, the people sure are. I had been excited to get up to Oswego because Nu Chapter of Mu Beta Psi is at SUNY Oswego, Garrett's alma mater. Nu Chapter is a great bunch of folks; not that my native Mu Chapter isn't, but each Chapter has its own identity and personality, and I feel so at home with the Nus. When I first met them over a year ago, they welcomed me as their own. Granted, we're all Brothers, so we're all each other's keepers, but they didn't make me feel like a Mu visiting Nus. They made me feel like a Brother visiting Brothers, which is how it should be. This time was no different. They were overjoyed to see me when I walked into their Brothers' meeting last night, and they included me in their conversations when we went out to eat afterwards. They're so friendly that one of them even cuddled with me this morning after Garrett left for work-- with his permission, of course (not that I wasn't a little surprised to see a face that was not Garrett's beside me-- she meant well, really).

I haven't had time to feel any real nostalgia for North Carolina, though I do frequently think about the folks I left behind. I miss them already, and I've found myself wondering what they're doing tonight and maybe we can go out to Franklin Street or something. Then I remember that Franklin Street is a bit of a hike for me now.

Just to let everyone know: I am saving up all the hugs I normally give you folks for when I come back for Christmas. So everyone in North Carolina, be prepared to be hugged to death by a small white girl.