Hosted by Corpus Curiosum, an online lecture series catered to early career researchers and designed to stimulate critical thinking in Neuroscience.
Music has played an important role in our societies, and particularly nowadays, its presence may be more important than ever. It is present in our lives even in other types of entertainment that may not be musical per se (e.g. advertisement, movies), people invest in music (e.g. concerts, instruments) and even rate music as one of the most pleasant experiences, competing with sex. Along with the fact that listening to music is characterized by unique cognitive responses, it is no wonder that it impacts our behavior, becoming a topic of interest from a psychological point of view. So is the impact, that we cannot help but recall musical experiences spontaneously from time to time. These involuntary musical imagery experiences are known as earworms, i.e. songs that get stuck in our heads. Importantly, these musical memories of common recall are endowed with their own particularities: they repeat in a loop and are an accurate representation of the original stimuli within several musical traits. In this talk, we will journey through musical perception in order to introduce these unexplained remnant musical events.