This evening, returning from a lovely dinner out with some friends, I realized — at the very moment I reached my door — that I had been replaying the same song over and over in my head for the previous twenty minutes. During those twenty minutes I had not been conscious of doing any such thing, but as soon as I caught myself, awareness and memory came flooding back all at once.<\/p>\n
I’ve found myself doing this sort of autopilot song-playing many times, with a surprisingly large variety of musical genres. This time it was Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue”. One recent evening I realized my mind had been endlessly replaying a version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (in particular, the Sad Kermit version of the Jeff Buckley cover).<\/p>\n
My unconscious mind does not seem to favor any particular type of music. At various times I have found myself endlessly replaying everything from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”. Apparently deep down my mind has highly catholic tastes.<\/p>\n
Several years ago some well meaning friends pitched in and bought me an iPod Touch. Dutifully I tried carrying it around the city with a pair of earphones, listening to my favorite songs. But it never really worked. No matter how much I liked any given song, hearing it through earphones seemed vaguely annoying, as though some intruder were trying to barge in on my brain uninvited.<\/p>\n
I realize only now what the problem was: The song in my ears was most likely interfering with whatever song was already playing in my head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This evening, returning from a lovely dinner out with some friends, I realized — at the very moment I reached my door — that I had been replaying the same song over and over in my head for the previous twenty minutes. During those twenty minutes I had not been conscious of doing any such … Continue reading “Song in my head”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4836"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4838,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4836\/revisions\/4838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}