Dr. Michael Scolin, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, found that he woke up in the middle of the night with a song stuck in his head, which gave him an opportunity to study whether music, especially songs that stick in the mind, It may affect the sleep pattern or not? provided
A recent study examines the relationship between listening to music and sleep, focusing on a mechanism that has rarely been explored. Involuntary musical imagery or “earworm” refers to a condition where a song plays over and over in a person’s mind. These usually happen when you’re awake, but Skolin found that they also happen when you’re trying to sleep.
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Scolin says: Our brain continues to process music even when we sleep, when we are not listening to any music. Everyone knows that listening to music feels good. The more you listen to music, the more likely you are to get earworms, which will cause sleep disturbances.
Earworm at night
People who regularly experience earwax at night, one or more times a week, have six times worse sleep quality compared to people who rarely get earwax.
The study consisted of a survey and a laboratory experiment involving 209 participants who completed a series of surveys on sleep quality, music listening habits, and earworm frequency.
Scolin says: Before going to sleep, we played three popular and catchy songs and randomly prompted the participants to listen to the original versions of those songs; Participants answered if and when they experienced earworms, then we analyzed whether this affected their nocturnal sleep physiology. People with earworms fell asleep more often, but had more nighttime awakenings and spent more time in light stages of sleep.
We observed these things both in the survey and during the empirical study. Participants with earworms showed slower oscillations during sleep, indicating memory reactivation. The increase in slow oscillations was dominant in the region of the primary auditory cortex, which is involved in earwax processing during wakefulness.
