Last Friday I got up and was getting ready for work. Just before I climbed in my pickup, I had the tune Soldier’s Joy running through my head. (This is a catchy melody that you often hear done instrumentally–such as by Willie Nelson or the Nitty-Gritty Dirt Band–it’s also present in some versions that have semi-nonsense lyrics).
I fired up my pickup and turned on the CD reader (which I had turned off during lunch of the previous day). The CD reader started reading the CD in it and then, lo and behold, the tune Soldier’s Joy starts playing.
I realized that Soldier’s Joy had been the last song I was listening to the previous day at lunch.
Now, you might think it was just a coincidence that I had Soldier’s Joy running through my head before I got in the truck and that it happened to be the last song I had been listening in my truck the previous day.
But it’s not.
This kind of thing happens to me ALL THE TIME.
It doesn’t matter what the tune is. It can be Soldier’s Joy or anything else. I just have a melody running through my mind when I’m about to get in the truck, then when I turn it on THAT song comes up on the CD player, and I realize that it was the last one I’d been listening to.
And it’s not like I’m doing this consciously. If you asked me "What was the last song you were listening to in your truck?" I would have absolutely NO IDEA.
But my subconscious knows and starts prepping me for a truck trip by calling up that melody.
What I want to know is: Is this just me or is it everybody?
So I’d like to conduct a little unscientific scientific survey. Could y’all use the combox to note whether you often, sometimes, or never have this happen to you?
Thanks! It’s for the cause of SCIENCE!
Even if it happens all the time, it’s just a coincidence, but enough to make you scratch your head. As for me, thoughts of people I haven’t thought about for years start popping in my head, and within a day or so I see their obit in the paper. Sometimes I knew them, or knew of them … sometimes they are/were famous. This has happened to me for years, but it’s just coincidence.
This never happens to me.
Did I mention that I only listen to talk radio?
Yep, happens all the time to me, both with songs on the radio and with people I haven’t spoken to or even thought of for some time. It/they just kinda creep into my concience and then the person/song/movie or whatever just happens to come along.
How many times have you run into someone and they tell you how they were just thinking about you?
Not really signicant in the big scheme of things but it does serve as a reminder of something at work beyond the physical world.
Daisy: Please don’t think of me!
That exact thing doesn’t happen to me — but similar things do — I think it’s your guardian angel communicating with your subconscious — and I think it goes on all the time, we only just notice it now and then.
But, it’s not a coincidence.
Sorry, Jimmy, but I don’t recall this ever happening to me.
it happens to me all the time, and my children as well. Not only do we have the song in our head, but we’re stuck in the very spot where the song left off when we turned it off. even my 7 year old will be whistling the phrase of music we last heard.
We frequently use music in our home schooling to aid in memorization, and the kids are taught the suzuki method in violin (the top 3 anyway) so they are trained to LISTEN to music which (I think) makes the phenomenon you describe more pronounced.
There is some name for this phenomena, but I can’t think of it at the moment.
It happens to me all the time. Usually after I have heard a Shania, ABBA, or Boney M song and those ‘wonderful’ melodies float through my brain until I can turn on some decent(quality, not moral) music.
On a spiritual note, every so often I will spontaneously start to hum or sing old AC/DC songs that come out of nowhere. In fact, it is almost always Highway to Hell or Hell’s Bells. The phrase ‘if God’s on the left, then I’m sticking to the right.’ is very disconcerting to have pop in your head as you are walking (‘processing’ for any liturgists reading this) down the communion line to receive the Eucharist.
Could it be ….. Satan?
It’s probably just similar chord progressions or fragments of melody, Tim. There are a lot of hymns (and not just contemporary ones, either!) which remind me of pop songs or of other songs written to the hymn tunes.
So it’s probably not Satan. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway! 🙂
If you’re really experiencing spiritual difficulty, maybe you can request a minor exorcism, like having the priest put holy water on your ears and bless them or something…. 🙂
This doesn’t really happen to me. But, I have had “deja vu” feelings, as I’m sure most people have.
Can’t remember the exact circumstances, but this sorta happened to me last week. I was out doing some pre-Christmas shopping (just scouting, getting some ideas), & was humming a song I’d had in my head for a while. When I entered a store . . . the song I was humming was playing. It was not a Christmas song. Odd.
I tend to obsess on songs – which means that, at any given time, I’ve got a few favorites that I tend to gravitate to & replay a lot. Many times, one of these songs will be floating in my head all day. (Today, it’s Java Jive! “I like coffee, I like tea, I love the Java Jive & it loves me! Coffee & tea & the java & me – a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!”) Not sure why some of these even pop into my noggin, really. Sometimes the only way I can get a song outta my head is to either listen to it & sing along (” . . . & when I sing in the car, I sound just like Connie Francis!” SIGH, I miss Gilda) or learn to play in on my gee-tawr.
BTW . . . I simply can’t get the new Nickel Creek CD outta my car. One of the most moral collections of popular songs (& the effects of our current society has on folks) I’ve heard in a long while!
This DOES happen to me all the time! When I get into my car, the song running through my head is whatever Jimmy was listening to last time he drove his truck! 😛
For real, it doesn’t happen to me. I listen to a lot of music all the time, and I listen to a limited amount of different songs, so what’s in my head is probably just what I last heard no matter where I was.
All. The. Stinking. Time.
I’ve heard them called “ear worms”.
What happens to me is, when my alarm clock goes off in the morning, whatever song is playing will stay in my brain all day.
Doesn’t matter if it’s Led Zeppelin or Burl Ives.
I’m just grateful that my kids have progressed past “Barney” and stuff like that. I used to walk around with those in my head.
Sometimes, my eyes would roll back and I’d scream “GET OUT OF MY MI-I-I-IND!!!”.
It didn’t help.
I can’t say that this in particular has happend, but on a related note . . .
For a time I was in a habit of playing a particular music CD while playing a particular video game. This went on for a month or two or whatever. I think it was maybe 3 seperate CDs coinciding with 3 seperate games. Whenever I played a particular game I played the same CD. Now whenver I hear a song from one of those CDs I immediately begin thinking of the associated video game. This works vice versa if I think of the game I remember which CD I listened to.
Music and memory go together like peas and carrots is the moral of this story.
hmmm
Serendipity strikes again 🙂
chalk up another one for God’s goodness and Divine Providence!
I always have a song in my head, then turn on the radio, and there it is. I assume my head is somehow receiving the signal in a minor way and my brain picks it up. Kinda like how people with braces are able to sometimes hear radio stations? I do have fillings.
But I’ve had the other thing happen to me where I was thinking strongly of someone, and when I finally contacted them, they were thinking of me at the same time.
I think the later of the two is spiritual while the former of the two is more likely naturalistic (unless I’m not picking up a radio station but actually getting the vibes of the people around me. ooh wow man! trippy)
Having played around with magic type things while I was in my agnostic and then early Christian stage, I can tell people that telepathy (as well as many other things) does exist. How it exists, and whether its a good thing to be experiencing, I’m not commenting on.
With regards to Ron Rollings’s comment, there is a name for what creates this phenomenon in psychology: the availability heuristic. What it means is that when we are trying to think of whether this kind of deja vu happens frequently, the information that is most available in our minds is the number of times the dejavu happens. The less available information is the number of times the deja vu did NOT happen. Because we overestimate the first and underestimate the second, we get a skewed result when we’re making an estimate of how often this happens.
Another example of the availability heuristic (if I am remembering it correctly) is to estimate whether there are more words in the English language that begin with P versus those that have P as a second letter. Most people don’t categorize based on the second letter, so they can’t remember a representative set of words that would show there are probable more words with P as the second letter, so they say there are more with the first letter. Make sense? (It’s been a while since I’ve had to explain this to anyone.)
I tend to listen to talk radio more often than music (and only have a cassette tape player in my van, and very few cassettes), so I can’t say that the exact phenomena happens to me. But, I frequently have psalm tones from LotH playing in my head, and now since attending a parish where the EP is all chanted, I will also find Mass prayers playing in my head. It’s nice to wake up in the middle of the night and realize that you’ve been unconsciously praying. 🙂
It never happens to me.
Ruling out memory characteristics described by David, it could just be dumb luck. Some people win the lottery, and some people repeatedly hear songs that they happened to be thinking about… and then there are people like me who never come across the song I was just humming.
Who knows, maybe next year our roles will be reversed, Jimmy.
yes it does. which is why i try to listen to as much good music as possible before i leave the house — to block any unwanted songs from creeping into my head and making a mess there.
doesn’t always work though. argh.
Happens to me all the time too. Also, every day I wake up with a different song in my head, even though I don’t usually listen to the radio. It might be a song that I like, or one I despise, but it suddenly pops in my head and stays in my mind for a good part of the day. It’s a torture when it’s a song I don’t like… I usually try to replace it with one I do like, but still… odd.
Jimmy, what you describes happens to me sometimes – I’d guess maybe once a week. It may depend on how long a cd spends in there (I think I’ve gone months listening to the same cd in the car).
What happens more often is my husband and I will be around the house, with the same song in our heads. I can only guess that one of us was humming it without noticing and the other picked it up subconsciously. But it’s fun to start singing the same dumb 80s song at the same time without expecting it!
I often take advantage of a similar phenomenon by “planting” a song in my head. For example, if I’m expecting a particularly difficult day, I may make sure that the last song I listen to before exiting my truck is one that will inspire me in one way or another and then I can easily “queue” it up in mind whenever I need a boost. But even if I don’t consciously do this the song is still there in the back of my mind and I find myself tapping my foot to its beat or just humming a few bars out of the blue.