Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia

A friend of mine, Nick Younes, described to me how he had been fixated on the song "Love and Marriage," a tune written by James Van Heusen. A single hearing of this song - a Frank Sinatra rendition used as a theme song of the television show Married... with Children - was enough to hook Nick. He "got trapped inside the tempo of the song," and it ran in his mind almost constantly for ten days. With incessant repetition, it soon lost its charm, its lilt, its musicality, and its meaning. It interfered with his schoolwork, his thinking, his peace of mind, his sleep. He tried to stop it in a number of ways, all to no avail: "I jumped up and down. I counted to a hundred. I splashed water on my face. I tried talking loudly to myself, plugging my ears." Finally it faded away - but as he told me this story, it returned and went on to haunt him again for several hours.
Though the term "earworm" was first used in the 1980s (as a literal translation of the German Ohrwurm), the concept is far from new. Nicolas Slonimsky, a composer and musicologist, was deliberately inventing musical forms or phrases that could hook the mind and force it to mimicry and repetition, as early as the 1920s. And in 1876, Mark Twain wrote a short story ("A Literary Nightmare," subsequently retitled "Punch, Brothers, Punch!") in which the narrator is rendered helpless after encountering some "jingling rhymes":

They took instant and entire possession of me. All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain. . . . I fought hard for an hour, but it was useless. My head kept humming. . . . I drifted downtown and presently discovered that my feet were keeping time to that relentless jingle. . . . [I] jingled all through the evening, went to bed, rolled, tossed, and jingled all night long.

Two days later, the narrator meets an old friend, a pastor, and inadvertently "infects" him with the jingle; the pastor, in turn, inadvertently infects his entire congregation.

Určitě to znáte. Jeden z oblíbených vtípků mého muže je nenápadně zanotovat nějakou dostatečně chytlavou melodii a pak se bavit, jak si ji po pár minutách začnu zpívat a po deseti si stěžuju, že ji nemůžu dostat z hlavy (a divím se, kde se tam vzala). Pamatuju si, že nám kdysi na fakultě někdo říkal, že tzv. "earworms" znamenají příklon k obsesivnímu myšlení, ale Sacks o tom nic nepíše, tak já budu taky dělat, že to nevím. Knížka je víc o mozku než o hudbě a dozvíte se z ní spoustu zajímavých věcí o vnímání hudby, o jejím spojení s emocemi, o absolutním sluchu, o zázračných hudebnících.. Oliver Sacks umí čtenáře nalákat, ve vhodnou chvíli přidá historku, drobnost, nezvyklou zkušenost. Podívejte se po ní, je i česky.