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