Dartmouth researchers have been looking into the way that a song gets stuck in our heads.

In a study titled "Sound of silence activates auditory cortex" published in the March 10 issue of Nature, the Dartmouth team found that if people are listening to music that is familiar, they mentally call upon auditory imagery, or memories, to fill in the gaps if the music cuts out. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity, the researchers found that study participants could mentally fill in the blanks if a familiar song was missing short snippets...

...The researchers say that this finding extends previous work on auditory imagery and parallels work on visual imagery, which both show that sensory-specific memories are stored in the brain regions that created those events.

There is never a time, waking or asleep, when my brain is not producing music. Barb says her brain is always talking, but mine is always playing or singing. This article mentions that songs with lyrics are "played" in a different region than instrumental pieces. I think my lyrics region is not as busy as the other region, because usually lyrics are the least of what I hear - sometimes whole orchestras and at the very least, complex harmonies.

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