From: The Washington Post
Why Catchy Songs Get Stuck in Your Head
April 24, 2025
Of all the sounds we encounter, music seems to be the stickiest for our brains.
While words and sounds can also pop into our head, they are less likely to echo there than songs, which tend to have a repetitive structure and looping motifs.
Speech doesn’t inherently have that structure, but poetry might. Simply repeating spoken words can make them sound musical, a phenomenon known as the speech-to-song illusion, which was discovered by psychologist Diana Deutsch.
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