March 8, 2011 • 16 mins
Have you ever had a musical hallucination? Not a song stuck in your head - but a genuine hallucination, real enough to completely fool your senses? Join Robert and Julie as they explore the causes of musical hallucinations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
did do you hear music? Do you hear music? Just now?
Like a little kind of electronic uh can kind of beat,
(00:23):
kind of bowl thing going on? Well not, but but
well there was, you know, it's just kind of a
beat to it, and oh, yeah, that's that's our music.
Oh okay, all right, well that then that makes sense.
Breathing you're not crazy to breathe a sigh of relief
there um, Because as as we're going to discuss in
this podcast, as we attempt to try some a little
(00:46):
new blow your mind in fifteen minutes or less, um,
there are these things called musical hallucinations, which is okay,
so you're not like having a hallucination about Annie the
musical right, but yeah, you do not. You're not hallucinating
that Daddy Warbucks is coming up to you and like
giving you a cookie and you're having and you're having
to chase dogs in the streets or anything good, because
that would be really frightening. Datty Warbock is awesome fun. Yeah,
(01:10):
but but no, it's not a visual hallucination. But it's
more like you're say, you're just setting there, you know,
in your living room alone or in your hospital bed alone,
and you you just keep hearing the sun will come
out tomorrow, the sun will come out tomorrow, just over
and over again, over and over again, and nobody else
can hear the Yeah, and you're like, you know, pulling
it nurses and saying, do you hear that? Do you
(01:31):
hear the sun will come out tomorrow? When when will
the song end? And then all of a sudden you're
injected with something and yeah, and it's not an ear worm.
It's not like you know, and you're not schizophrenic either,
right right though in schizophrenica they do well, Schizophrenics often
experience uh or in some cases experience what's called a
pseudo hallucination, a pseudo music hallucination within a hallucination. No,
(01:56):
pseudo hallucination is when you you know that it's not
coming from the role, like you're not fooled by it.
So it's a situation where you're not saying, whoa who's
playing that music? You're like, there's this music and it's
not real, and it's you know, it's clearly not coming
from some sort of outside force. Okay, so that's just
like the background music to hallucinations if you're schizophrenic. But
if you're not schizophrenic, it just seems to be coming
(02:18):
out of nowhere, right, it seems like it's coming out
of the stereo. Now. It's also important to note that
some auditory hallucinations are normal, like especially when you're just
as you're waking up in the morning or going to
sleep at night. Uh, you you there's a chance you'll
hear something that's not real. But if you're hearing it
elsewhere in the day, like like I said, just at noon,
(02:38):
you haven't been asleep or anything and you're hearing a song,
then then that's where you probably need to go to
a doctor. And this is a real thing. This is
a real thing. You're not making this up, not a
joke podcast. Well, and this is the thing that I
think it's troublesome is it's mostly found in the elderly population,
right with with hearing loss, yes, which is I mean
it's kind of like, all right, you're getting older, you're
(03:00):
hard of hearing, and then all of a sudden you
have this loop of music that you can't stop. It
seems terribly depressing. Yeah. One of the stats I was
looking at is one and about ten thousand people over
the age of sixty five experienced these and uh. And
again it's commonly elderly people with hearing problems. There's this guy,
doctor Victor Disease. Yes, yeah, not to be confused with
(03:20):
Comedian of Saint Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Uh. And he
studied musical hallucinations in thirty patients and he found that indeed,
they generally occur in patients around seventy three years old.
Eight percent women. Um, well, I mean women live longer,
so I can't help but think that probably right, Uh,
live alone and uh and many of them had hearing impairment,
(03:42):
right right. And I actually was looking at the Journal
of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry and they had a couple
of examples of this. Um. They're both women that were
in seventy five and eighty um. But the one, the
eighty year old nun, she was a retired school teacher
and she had actually had a deafness or a level
of deafness for like forty years. But then she happened
(04:02):
to hear um ringing and buzzing in her ears, and
then she heard a really loud, intense noise that was
coming from traffic, or so she reported. And several hours
later she became aware of an intense noise in her
head and she said it was like a boiler factory.
And this was followed by the perception of someone singing
jingle bells boiler factory. I think that's a drum and
(04:24):
bass grout. I know, I kept thinking, boiler factory. What
does a boiler factory sound like? You know? Um? I
mean it just sounds like a cauldron of soup. Was
interesting in the study that has ease, did they actually
nailed down the most common songs that these these older
at The number one was who Let the Dogs Out?
And the number two was was an all In Parson's
(04:47):
project song And now I'm just kidding, but no, it's
like that. One of the big ones was like an
old like um religious tune called a Bide with Me.
I don't know it, yeah, but apparently it was big
back in the day. So because that's the thing. The
they're kind of like earworms in the sense that they
are that you're gonna you're gonna have musical hallucinations of
songs that you've heard before, songs you've probably liked or
(05:08):
you've just heard over and over again throughout your life
to the point of nausea, you know, right right, Because
there's there's the memory part of the brain, especially in
people who have some level of deafness, that are reconstructing
this strong this song right. Um. And we we'll get
into a little bit later about why that is, why
it's going haywire, so to speak. But I also wanted
(05:29):
to mention that epileptic seizure, certain medications, and lyme disease
are a few of the factors that might set this
off as well. So you don't necessarily have to be
elderly with some level of deafness. You could have had
some sort of procedure. Um. Actually, this happens to Um.
There was one man who had a heart operation and
(05:50):
then he woke up later and began to hear It
wasn't like Eva, prone, don't cry for me, Argentina. That
was kind of great and awful at the same time. Um.
So it's not just you know, you don't have to
be deaf to do this. This is this happens. Yeah,
and again I'm disease, So check for ticks because otherwise
(06:11):
you might wind up having I can't get no satisfaction
over and over again into your head until you go
completely mad. Yeah, you don't have to keep thinking about this.
Like the generations to come, if this happens to them,
will they have like Justin Bieber or like baby you
know baby, it'll be that Lady Gaga song will be Yeah, yeah,
(06:31):
I won't do it. I think I've pushed it far
enough with Justin Bieler. This presentation is brought to you
by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. So, yeah, you have this
happening mainly with the elderly population and with people who
(06:53):
are have had some sort of deafness. Um. But both
of the patients that I talked about, that five year
old woman who had something similar in which she had
old hymns and the eighty year old woman who was
the former nun who had jingle bells, both of them
could replace these hallucinations willfully with songs, other songs or
(07:14):
prose of their own choosing um by concentrating. Oh wow.
So they're just kind of like it's like an internal
iPod and you just like think hard enough and you
can skip to a different track. Yeah, and one of
them could actually slow it down to Oh that sounds
kind of nightmaric. I know. Yeah, you know, but but
where you think that you're hearing the devils. Yeah, I
(07:34):
would always saying, I mean, I would have these night
tares or they're kind of like night tares when I
was a kid, where it would be Fred Sandford speaking
really slowly. Yes, I'm serious, not making that up. I
didn't happen long, but it would like it happened a
couple of times, and it was scary because you wake
up and it's just like Roman and all that stuff.
And I mean, I can't even do it is like
slow motion, as if Fred Sandford were speaking through a fan.
(07:57):
We're talking about Sanford the Sun here. Yeah, yeah, Red Fox. Yeah, okay,
just just for so yeah, slowing down jingle bells sounds horrifying. Yeah,
it could be very much. Um, So you know, I
guess the question is why does it happen? Yes, and uh.
And researchers believe that that that these hallucinations may actually
you know, it comes down to disruptions in the communication
(08:19):
pathways between the sensory centers in the neo cortex of
the brain and the reticular formation. So it's um. For instance,
of pet scans they've done, they found that the patients
are of suffering from these musical hallucinations. All right. It
lights up the same areas of the brain that are
lit up by listening to music. So the brain is
(08:40):
actually stimulating itself to to get the to get this music,
to get these sounds going. Uh, and it's retrieving them
from the patient's memories. Okay. And this is in the
elderly population with levels of deafness. Okay, so they're having
the same parts of their brain light up as someone
who with normal hearing. Yeah, okay, So I guess the
problem is then that the it doesn't activate the primary
(09:02):
auditory cortex, which is the first stop for sound in
the brain. So when they're hallucinating, they're only using parts
of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds
into complex music. And so these regions, these music processing regions,
may be continually looking for signals in the brain that
they can interpret, and that's where it gets kind of haywire, right, Yeah,
(09:24):
I kind of get the I guess the way I
tend to to sort of interpret it though. It's it's
kind of like the brain is like, hey, we really
need to listen to Alan Parson's projects I in the
Sky song, but we can't. We can't find it and
we can't actually hear it. Go into go into the memory,
see what you can find. Let's drag that out and
let's let's listen to it inside and seeing. I think
that's fascinating. And it's trying to match the impulses to
(09:46):
the memories of music, right, But it's not all the
hardwares there. Um So, it is that sort of mental
malfunction with these random impulses that are generated by the brain.
Um so. I mean this would also explain why so
many of the sufferers happen to be deaf or hearing
impaired because they they're stimuli deprived. Hearing centers of the
(10:07):
brain have become so hyper sensitive to these impulses. Yeah,
it's kind of nuts. Um did you know about the
O C D factor? No, I don't think I ran
across that. It's pretty interesting. It's a study by Dr
Haggai Harmesh and he presented a link between musical hallucinations
and O C D so UM, because researchers examined people
with a bunch of mental disorders bipolar UM, depressive disorder
(10:33):
O c D, panic disorder, schizophrenia, social phobia, and so
on and so forth, and of those groups, none ranked
as high in instances of musical hallucinations as those patients
with O c D forty one as compared to in schizophrenics,
which I thought was really interesting because there's this sort
of repetitive thought element to it which is a hallmark
(10:56):
of O c D. It's like, instead of washing your hands,
it's that song. It's that Yeah, you're you're struggling your
brain with this song over and over again. UM. So
that actually has been really useful for doctors because they
begin to use SSR eyes to try to treat it. Um.
If it happens to fall on the O c D
marker Um, do they think that they might be able
to alleviate it a little bit that way? Um? Because
(11:18):
if if you can, you know, ramp down those O
c D UM elements of it, then the thought is
then maybe you could quiet the repetitive of the song
now given sufficient hearing. UM. I understand they've also been
able to use the just some like headphones, iPods. Yeah,
well that's what I think. That's fascinating. It's like we'll
(11:38):
just combat it with another song, you know, So just
okay that justin Bieber song is getting your nerves? How
about this one? You know? Um? But yeah, I mean
that's that's sort of the sad part of this is
that there's really no bulletproof method to get rid of this.
People just sort of have to live with it. And
uh ZS actually argues and every time I say his name,
I'm still picturing his sound. Sorry. But yeah, but as
(12:01):
these beliefs that that that that our use are just
excessive use of iPods and and walkman's in the modern era,
that it's gonna make us even more susceptible to this
as this generation gets older. Yeah, I kind of wonder
about before because I mean, you've all we've always been
bombarded by um all sorts of auditorious stimuli, right, Yeah,
I mean on one level, it's like I do feel
(12:21):
like like iPods and Wattmans it allows us to just
constantly just bombard our brain with the soundtrack. I mean,
I know, I am just I constantly have music going
unless I'm you know, actually having to socialize with somebody. Um,
I mean, I'm listening to a mix right now in
my other ear. I'm only get you know, I was
and see your earbud. Yeah, but but you know, it's
(12:42):
it's so on one hand, yeah, I can say, yeah,
a lot of people were listening, probably to more music
than you could have in recent ages. But I think
people were music junkies. Have We've had music junkies for
a while. I mean, you can you know, it's not
like you could only play a record player for an
hour a day and you had to have like a
donkey moving. They have, you know, empowering the turntable. Yeah, yeah,
(13:03):
which would be kind of cool or not. I mean
if you're a luddite. Yeah, but um, but yeah, I
don't think it's necessarily going to increase incidences of this, right,
because it does seem to be something that has to
do with hearing loss and just getting that part of
the circuitry um sort of tripped up. But to me,
it's like, if anything, having more access to music is
(13:26):
just another diversion, right, Yeah, And it seems like at
the very least you'll you've have there's so much great
music out there that we're able to, you know, find
in so little time that at least the stuff is
gonna be stuck in our heads when we get older.
It's gonna be really good. Yeah, hopefully, right. I mean,
I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I don't know. Is it fifteen minutes?
We're not actually timing this. I don't know. We might
(13:47):
have gone over if if we did. Hey, bonus, you
didn't even have to pay for that extra that's right,
if you didn't. Hey, that's that's another couple of minutes
to put on your favorite tune. Hey. Speaking of of
of ending it here, though, let's go ahead and jump
onto the listener mail. We had a listener by the
name of nerf while or at least that's his I
(14:09):
think it's his, uh because hand Yeah, I think he's
a programmer, a program director somewhere, so that's his handle.
And uh. He says, Hey, Robert Julie, I enjoyed your
podcast on swarm psychology and intelligence. Uh. And then he
goes on to point out something that that he really
contributes to the conversation. Here. He says, there's a naturalist
philosophy called the guy a principle part of the theory
(14:31):
is that at a certain point of human population growth,
if I recall call it correctly ten billion, the humans
of the planet will function together as a single higher organism.
The planet thinking is one with humans acting as brain
cells of the unified mind. On the surface, that sounds
far fetch, mystical and awesome, but if you look around
at the world we live in today, it seems to
(14:52):
be the direction we're going in. Things like trending topics
on Twitter, RSS feeds, and even outsourced phone banks might
make it seem a lot closer to reality than it
would have only five years ago, as we pro approached
ten billion, Doesn't it seem like this is slowly becoming
a reality? So I think it's a very good question, right,
I mean, we've this The population is unprecedented, right, we
(15:13):
know it's just going to grow exponentially. So does that
change the way that we behave as a species future thought? Yeah?
There you can. So, Hey, if you have any kind
of cultivates to share with us about the past podcast,
and indeed, if you have any personal experience with musical
hallucinations or anything similar, um, God, please tell us, Yes,
(15:35):
please tell us, because we would love to and you know,
and if you want to remain anonymous on any of
these things you send us, just make a note about it,
and we're happy to retain your secrets for you. I mean,
we'll share your secrets, but we'll just we'll just want
tell them, tell everybody whose secrets they are. You can
always share your secrets with us on Facebook and Twitter
and let's blow the mind for both of those, and
(15:56):
you can also email us at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
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(16:17):
today on iTunes
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
did do you hear music? Do you hear music? Just now?
Like a little kind of electronic uh can kind of beat,
(00:23):
kind of bowl thing going on? Well not, but but
well there was, you know, it's just kind of a
beat to it, and oh, yeah, that's that's our music.
Oh okay, all right, well that then that makes sense.
Breathing you're not crazy to breathe a sigh of relief
there um, Because as as we're going to discuss in
this podcast, as we attempt to try some a little
(00:46):
new blow your mind in fifteen minutes or less, um,
there are these things called musical hallucinations, which is okay,
so you're not like having a hallucination about Annie the
musical right, but yeah, you do not. You're not hallucinating
that Daddy Warbucks is coming up to you and like
giving you a cookie and you're having and you're having
to chase dogs in the streets or anything good, because
that would be really frightening. Datty Warbock is awesome fun. Yeah,
(01:10):
but but no, it's not a visual hallucination. But it's
more like you're say, you're just setting there, you know,
in your living room alone or in your hospital bed alone,
and you you just keep hearing the sun will come
out tomorrow, the sun will come out tomorrow, just over
and over again, over and over again, and nobody else
can hear the Yeah, and you're like, you know, pulling
it nurses and saying, do you hear that? Do you
(01:31):
hear the sun will come out tomorrow? When when will
the song end? And then all of a sudden you're
injected with something and yeah, and it's not an ear worm.
It's not like you know, and you're not schizophrenic either,
right right though in schizophrenica they do well, Schizophrenics often
experience uh or in some cases experience what's called a
pseudo hallucination, a pseudo music hallucination within a hallucination. No,
(01:56):
pseudo hallucination is when you you know that it's not
coming from the role, like you're not fooled by it.
So it's a situation where you're not saying, whoa who's
playing that music? You're like, there's this music and it's
not real, and it's you know, it's clearly not coming
from some sort of outside force. Okay, so that's just
like the background music to hallucinations if you're schizophrenic. But
if you're not schizophrenic, it just seems to be coming
(02:18):
out of nowhere, right, it seems like it's coming out
of the stereo. Now. It's also important to note that
some auditory hallucinations are normal, like especially when you're just
as you're waking up in the morning or going to
sleep at night. Uh, you you there's a chance you'll
hear something that's not real. But if you're hearing it
elsewhere in the day, like like I said, just at noon,
(02:38):
you haven't been asleep or anything and you're hearing a song,
then then that's where you probably need to go to
a doctor. And this is a real thing. This is
a real thing. You're not making this up, not a
joke podcast. Well, and this is the thing that I
think it's troublesome is it's mostly found in the elderly population,
right with with hearing loss, yes, which is I mean
it's kind of like, all right, you're getting older, you're
(03:00):
hard of hearing, and then all of a sudden you
have this loop of music that you can't stop. It
seems terribly depressing. Yeah. One of the stats I was
looking at is one and about ten thousand people over
the age of sixty five experienced these and uh. And
again it's commonly elderly people with hearing problems. There's this guy,
doctor Victor Disease. Yes, yeah, not to be confused with
(03:20):
Comedian of Saint Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Uh. And he
studied musical hallucinations in thirty patients and he found that indeed,
they generally occur in patients around seventy three years old.
Eight percent women. Um, well, I mean women live longer,
so I can't help but think that probably right, Uh,
live alone and uh and many of them had hearing impairment,
(03:42):
right right. And I actually was looking at the Journal
of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry and they had a couple
of examples of this. Um. They're both women that were
in seventy five and eighty um. But the one, the
eighty year old nun, she was a retired school teacher
and she had actually had a deafness or a level
of deafness for like forty years. But then she happened
(04:02):
to hear um ringing and buzzing in her ears, and
then she heard a really loud, intense noise that was
coming from traffic, or so she reported. And several hours
later she became aware of an intense noise in her
head and she said it was like a boiler factory.
And this was followed by the perception of someone singing
jingle bells boiler factory. I think that's a drum and
(04:24):
bass grout. I know, I kept thinking, boiler factory. What
does a boiler factory sound like? You know? Um? I
mean it just sounds like a cauldron of soup. Was
interesting in the study that has ease, did they actually
nailed down the most common songs that these these older
at The number one was who Let the Dogs Out?
And the number two was was an all In Parson's
(04:47):
project song And now I'm just kidding, but no, it's
like that. One of the big ones was like an
old like um religious tune called a Bide with Me.
I don't know it, yeah, but apparently it was big
back in the day. So because that's the thing. The
they're kind of like earworms in the sense that they
are that you're gonna you're gonna have musical hallucinations of
songs that you've heard before, songs you've probably liked or
(05:08):
you've just heard over and over again throughout your life
to the point of nausea, you know, right right, Because
there's there's the memory part of the brain, especially in
people who have some level of deafness, that are reconstructing
this strong this song right. Um. And we we'll get
into a little bit later about why that is, why
it's going haywire, so to speak. But I also wanted
(05:29):
to mention that epileptic seizure, certain medications, and lyme disease
are a few of the factors that might set this
off as well. So you don't necessarily have to be
elderly with some level of deafness. You could have had
some sort of procedure. Um. Actually, this happens to Um.
There was one man who had a heart operation and
(05:50):
then he woke up later and began to hear It
wasn't like Eva, prone, don't cry for me, Argentina. That
was kind of great and awful at the same time. Um.
So it's not just you know, you don't have to
be deaf to do this. This is this happens. Yeah,
and again I'm disease, So check for ticks because otherwise
(06:11):
you might wind up having I can't get no satisfaction
over and over again into your head until you go
completely mad. Yeah, you don't have to keep thinking about this.
Like the generations to come, if this happens to them,
will they have like Justin Bieber or like baby you
know baby, it'll be that Lady Gaga song will be Yeah, yeah,
(06:31):
I won't do it. I think I've pushed it far
enough with Justin Bieler. This presentation is brought to you
by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. So, yeah, you have this
happening mainly with the elderly population and with people who
(06:53):
are have had some sort of deafness. Um. But both
of the patients that I talked about, that five year
old woman who had something similar in which she had
old hymns and the eighty year old woman who was
the former nun who had jingle bells, both of them
could replace these hallucinations willfully with songs, other songs or
(07:14):
prose of their own choosing um by concentrating. Oh wow.
So they're just kind of like it's like an internal
iPod and you just like think hard enough and you
can skip to a different track. Yeah, and one of
them could actually slow it down to Oh that sounds
kind of nightmaric. I know. Yeah, you know, but but
where you think that you're hearing the devils. Yeah, I
(07:34):
would always saying, I mean, I would have these night
tares or they're kind of like night tares when I
was a kid, where it would be Fred Sandford speaking
really slowly. Yes, I'm serious, not making that up. I
didn't happen long, but it would like it happened a
couple of times, and it was scary because you wake
up and it's just like Roman and all that stuff.
And I mean, I can't even do it is like
slow motion, as if Fred Sandford were speaking through a fan.
(07:57):
We're talking about Sanford the Sun here. Yeah, yeah, Red Fox. Yeah, okay,
just just for so yeah, slowing down jingle bells sounds horrifying. Yeah,
it could be very much. Um, So you know, I
guess the question is why does it happen? Yes, and uh.
And researchers believe that that that these hallucinations may actually
you know, it comes down to disruptions in the communication
(08:19):
pathways between the sensory centers in the neo cortex of
the brain and the reticular formation. So it's um. For instance,
of pet scans they've done, they found that the patients
are of suffering from these musical hallucinations. All right. It
lights up the same areas of the brain that are
lit up by listening to music. So the brain is
(08:40):
actually stimulating itself to to get the to get this music,
to get these sounds going. Uh, and it's retrieving them
from the patient's memories. Okay. And this is in the
elderly population with levels of deafness. Okay, so they're having
the same parts of their brain light up as someone
who with normal hearing. Yeah, okay, So I guess the
problem is then that the it doesn't activate the primary
(09:02):
auditory cortex, which is the first stop for sound in
the brain. So when they're hallucinating, they're only using parts
of the brain that are responsible for turning simple sounds
into complex music. And so these regions, these music processing regions,
may be continually looking for signals in the brain that
they can interpret, and that's where it gets kind of haywire, right, Yeah,
(09:24):
I kind of get the I guess the way I
tend to to sort of interpret it though. It's it's
kind of like the brain is like, hey, we really
need to listen to Alan Parson's projects I in the
Sky song, but we can't. We can't find it and
we can't actually hear it. Go into go into the memory,
see what you can find. Let's drag that out and
let's let's listen to it inside and seeing. I think
that's fascinating. And it's trying to match the impulses to
(09:46):
the memories of music, right, But it's not all the
hardwares there. Um So, it is that sort of mental
malfunction with these random impulses that are generated by the brain.
Um so. I mean this would also explain why so
many of the sufferers happen to be deaf or hearing
impaired because they they're stimuli deprived. Hearing centers of the
(10:07):
brain have become so hyper sensitive to these impulses. Yeah,
it's kind of nuts. Um did you know about the
O C D factor? No, I don't think I ran
across that. It's pretty interesting. It's a study by Dr
Haggai Harmesh and he presented a link between musical hallucinations
and O C D so UM, because researchers examined people
with a bunch of mental disorders bipolar UM, depressive disorder
(10:33):
O c D, panic disorder, schizophrenia, social phobia, and so
on and so forth, and of those groups, none ranked
as high in instances of musical hallucinations as those patients
with O c D forty one as compared to in schizophrenics,
which I thought was really interesting because there's this sort
of repetitive thought element to it which is a hallmark
(10:56):
of O c D. It's like, instead of washing your hands,
it's that song. It's that Yeah, you're you're struggling your
brain with this song over and over again. UM. So
that actually has been really useful for doctors because they
begin to use SSR eyes to try to treat it. Um.
If it happens to fall on the O c D
marker Um, do they think that they might be able
to alleviate it a little bit that way? Um? Because
(11:18):
if if you can, you know, ramp down those O
c D UM elements of it, then the thought is
then maybe you could quiet the repetitive of the song
now given sufficient hearing. UM. I understand they've also been
able to use the just some like headphones, iPods. Yeah,
well that's what I think. That's fascinating. It's like we'll
(11:38):
just combat it with another song, you know, So just
okay that justin Bieber song is getting your nerves? How
about this one? You know? Um? But yeah, I mean
that's that's sort of the sad part of this is
that there's really no bulletproof method to get rid of this.
People just sort of have to live with it. And
uh ZS actually argues and every time I say his name,
I'm still picturing his sound. Sorry. But yeah, but as
(12:01):
these beliefs that that that that our use are just
excessive use of iPods and and walkman's in the modern era,
that it's gonna make us even more susceptible to this
as this generation gets older. Yeah, I kind of wonder
about before because I mean, you've all we've always been
bombarded by um all sorts of auditorious stimuli, right, Yeah,
I mean on one level, it's like I do feel
(12:21):
like like iPods and Wattmans it allows us to just
constantly just bombard our brain with the soundtrack. I mean,
I know, I am just I constantly have music going
unless I'm you know, actually having to socialize with somebody. Um,
I mean, I'm listening to a mix right now in
my other ear. I'm only get you know, I was
and see your earbud. Yeah, but but you know, it's
(12:42):
it's so on one hand, yeah, I can say, yeah,
a lot of people were listening, probably to more music
than you could have in recent ages. But I think
people were music junkies. Have We've had music junkies for
a while. I mean, you can you know, it's not
like you could only play a record player for an
hour a day and you had to have like a
donkey moving. They have, you know, empowering the turntable. Yeah, yeah,
(13:03):
which would be kind of cool or not. I mean
if you're a luddite. Yeah, but um, but yeah, I
don't think it's necessarily going to increase incidences of this, right,
because it does seem to be something that has to
do with hearing loss and just getting that part of
the circuitry um sort of tripped up. But to me,
it's like, if anything, having more access to music is
(13:26):
just another diversion, right, Yeah, And it seems like at
the very least you'll you've have there's so much great
music out there that we're able to, you know, find
in so little time that at least the stuff is
gonna be stuck in our heads when we get older.
It's gonna be really good. Yeah, hopefully, right. I mean,
I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I don't know. Is it fifteen minutes?
We're not actually timing this. I don't know. We might
(13:47):
have gone over if if we did. Hey, bonus, you
didn't even have to pay for that extra that's right,
if you didn't. Hey, that's that's another couple of minutes
to put on your favorite tune. Hey. Speaking of of
of ending it here, though, let's go ahead and jump
onto the listener mail. We had a listener by the
name of nerf while or at least that's his I
(14:09):
think it's his, uh because hand Yeah, I think he's
a programmer, a program director somewhere, so that's his handle.
And uh. He says, Hey, Robert Julie, I enjoyed your
podcast on swarm psychology and intelligence. Uh. And then he
goes on to point out something that that he really
contributes to the conversation. Here. He says, there's a naturalist
philosophy called the guy a principle part of the theory
(14:31):
is that at a certain point of human population growth,
if I recall call it correctly ten billion, the humans
of the planet will function together as a single higher organism.
The planet thinking is one with humans acting as brain
cells of the unified mind. On the surface, that sounds
far fetch, mystical and awesome, but if you look around
at the world we live in today, it seems to
(14:52):
be the direction we're going in. Things like trending topics
on Twitter, RSS feeds, and even outsourced phone banks might
make it seem a lot closer to reality than it
would have only five years ago, as we pro approached
ten billion, Doesn't it seem like this is slowly becoming
a reality? So I think it's a very good question, right,
I mean, we've this The population is unprecedented, right, we
(15:13):
know it's just going to grow exponentially. So does that
change the way that we behave as a species future thought? Yeah?
There you can. So, Hey, if you have any kind
of cultivates to share with us about the past podcast,
and indeed, if you have any personal experience with musical
hallucinations or anything similar, um, God, please tell us, Yes,
(15:35):
please tell us, because we would love to and you know,
and if you want to remain anonymous on any of
these things you send us, just make a note about it,
and we're happy to retain your secrets for you. I mean,
we'll share your secrets, but we'll just we'll just want
tell them, tell everybody whose secrets they are. You can
always share your secrets with us on Facebook and Twitter
and let's blow the mind for both of those, and
(15:56):
you can also email us at blow the Mind at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
How Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
(16:17):
today on iTunes
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