🧠 Music and the brain

Your brain constantly predicts what a piece of music will do next, and a well-placed surprise sets off the same reward system that responds to other things you enjoy. The physical shiver is an old bodily reaction being triggered by something purely abstract.

A stuck song is usually short, repetitive and just within your ability to sing. Your memory holds it in a loop, particularly when you were interrupted before the end, and trying hard not to think about it tends to make it worse.

It genuinely can. Setting information to a tune adds rhythm, rhyme and melodic shape, and each of those gives your memory an extra handle to grab, which is why people who cannot recall a list can often sing one.

Listening to sadness in music is not the same as being sad, because you keep the emotion without the loss that normally causes it. Many people also find it comforting evidence that somebody else has felt the same thing and made something beautiful out of it.