Listening to music releases dopamine in the brain, with our dopamine levels increasing by up to 9% when listening to music we enjoy. The more we listen to music, the more it spontaneously comes to mind.Īpps like Heardle are satisfying to play because “when we perceive or imagine music that’s quite meaningful to us, we get activation in what we call the reward centers of our brain,” Jakubowski says.

As you might imagine, people who listen to or engage with music more frequently tend to experience more earworms. It’s quite common to have a song stuck in your head-“around 90% of people say they have an earworm at least once a week and around ⅓ of people say they have an earworm at least once a day,” she notes. That’s what we call an earworm, when we get a song that pops into mind without you actually trying to recall any music,” Jakubowski says. “This can happen voluntarily or deliberately, so if I think of the song ‘Happy Birthday,’ you can probably hear it playing in your mind right now, but it can also happen involuntarily. Manyof us can hear music in our minds, which is called having musical or auditory imagery. “You present one note see how long it takes people to identify a piece of music, so I think that it’s quite funny that they’ve kind of tapped on that. Kelly Jakubowski, assistant professor of music psychology at Durham University in the U.K. “There is an approach called the gating paradigm very similar to the Heardle app,” says Dr. The popularity of Heardle taps into an interesting part of human psychology: how deeply we store music in memory and how easily we can recall it. Millions of players have used Heardle to identify popular and nostalgic songs from different generations, from the Fugees to Spice Girls to Adele. I was excited to have a place to use my musical knowledge, and I’m not the only one. It tests musical memory by asking people to identify a song after hearing only one second of it, and for every wrong guess, extends the track by one second. In March, a new Wordle spinoff called Heardle launched. It’s no surprise that we have such a strong memory for music and can easily recall lyrics and melodies, even if we haven’t heard them in years. In 2017, Nielsen estimated that Americans spend over 32 hours a week on average listening to music.

I spent 53,402 minutes in 2021-17 hours a week-which is far more time than I’ve spent doing most other things. Every year, Spotify tells us how many minutes we’ve spent listening to music. It’s constantly playing in the background, whether we’re at a coffee shop, in the elevator, working from home, or even just walking down the street. For many people, music feels like a part of our subconscious.

We are who we are song lyrics