Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for musical sequence knowledge.

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and characterized. Findings that spontaneous reactivation of mental representations aids in memory consolidation raise the possibility that INMI also serves in this capacity.

Narratives imagined in response to instrumental music reveal culture-bounded intersubjectivity.

The scientific literature sometimes considers music an abstract stimulus, devoid of explicit meaning, and at other times considers it a universal language. Here, individuals in three geographically distinct locations spanning two cultures performed a highly unconstrained task: they provided free-response descriptions of stories they imagined while listening to instrumental music. Tools from natural language processing revealed that listeners provide highly similar stories to the same musical excerpts when they share an underlying culture, but when they do not, the generated stories show limited overlap.

Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for incidentally associated event knowledge.

Why is music effective at evoking memories from one's past? Familiar music is a potent cue that can trigger, often involuntarily, the recollection of associated autobiographical memories. The mechanisms by which associations between music and nonmusical knowledge initially form and consolidate into long-term memory have not been elucidated. In three experiments, we linked two common musical phenomena, involuntary musical imagery (INMI; commonly called "earworms") and music-evoked remembering, in testing the hypothesis that such imagery aids in the consolidation of memory for events with which music becomes associated.