Professor Catherine Loveday, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, appeared on BBC World Service’s Health Check programme and spoke about the impact of listening to music on the brain when trying to fall asleep.
The podcast discusses the popular idea that listening to music to help you fall asleep can bring an unwanted side effects of earworms, where you are unable to get a song out of your head, leading to irritation and inability to fall asleep. Professor Catherine Loveday covers this idea, and discusses the impact of this research.
Professor Loveday said: “People will be very familiar with the idea of having a sentence or a thought going round and round their head, or if they’ve been driving or playing a computer game then they get those images that circulate round while they’re trying to get to sleep. It doesn’t surprise me at all, and I see it as a good thing because it’s our brain’s way of making those memories by repeating those neuro firings.”
She continued: “I really don’t think we should be put off to listening to music when going to bed, I think it’s a normal adaptive response for our brain to rehearse stuff. I’m a musician, and that going through things in my head is part of my brain’s way of making those memories. We also know that replaying bits of music is another way of helping to embed our daytime event memories as well, so it’s a positive thing, and I think people are really intuitive about choosing the right kind of music for themselves as well.”
Listen to the full podcast on BBC Sounds.
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