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September 18, 2009

Strange But True!

Q. In his 1876 story “A Literary Nightmare,” Mark Twain described his narrator as rendered helpless by his obsession with certain jingle rhymes: “They took instant and entire possession of me. All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain... Presently I discovered my feet were keeping time to that relentless jingle... I jingled all through the evening, went to bed, rolled, tossed, and jingled all night long.” What's behind today's epidemic of such “brainworms”?

A. Although brainworms are no doubt ancient, the term has come into common use only in the last few decades, probably because suddenly music is ubiquitous, says neurologist Oliver Sacks in his book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.”


 
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