Musical hallucinations, musical imagery, and earworms: A new phenomenological survey

Moseley, Peter; Alderson-Day, Ben; Kumar, Sukhbinder; Fernyhough, Charles

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2018.07.009

Cited by 22 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…One paper that we retained following the initial literature search (Bailes, 2007 ) made no explicit differentiation between INMI and voluntary musical imagery, but is discussed in the present review on the basis of its seminal contribution in establishing a methodology for capturing musical imagery experiences in everyday life. In addition, some papers identified in the initial search examined broader or related phenomena, such as involuntary memories and musical hallucinations (e.g., Beaty et al, 2013 ; Floridou et al, 2018 ; Moseley, Alderson-Day, Kumar, & Fernyhough, 2018 ), but were retained for the review on the basis that they reported novel results on INMI specifically.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence

Liikkanen

Jakubowski

2020

Psychon Bull Rev

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Involuntary musical imagery (INMI) refers to a conscious mental experience of music that occurs without deliberate efforts to initiate or sustain it. This experience often consists of the repetition of a short fragment of a melody, colloquially called an "earworm." Here, we present the first comprehensive, qualitative review of published empirical research on INMI to date. We performed an extensive literature search and discovered, in total, 47 studies from 33 peer-reviewed articles that met the inclusion criteria for the review. In analyzing the content of these studies, we identified four major research themes, which concern the phenomenology, dynamics, individual differences, and musical features of INMI. The findings answer many questions of scientific interest-for instance, what is typical in terms of INMI frequency, duration, and content; which factors influence INMI onset; and whether demographic and personality factors can explain individual differences in susceptibility and responses to INMI. This review showcases INMI as a well-established phenomenon in light of a substantial body of empirical studies that have accumulated consistent results. Although the populations under study show an unfavorable bias towards Western, educated participants, the evidence depicts INMI as a universal psychological phenomenon, the possible function of which we do not yet fully understand. The concluding section introduces several suggestions for future research to expand on the topic.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence

Liikkanen

Jakubowski

2020

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…An interest in the topic has been rekindled within the last 20 years by several neuroimaging studies investigating the effects of music perception and imagery in the brains of both musicians and non-musicians (e.g., Zatorre, 1999;Lotze et al, 2003;Herholz et al, 2008). Recently, most references to musical imagery have focused on ''involuntary musical imagery'' (IMI, sometimes called ''earworms,'' ''sticky music,'' ''catchy tunes,'' or simply ''hooks''; e.g., Sacks, 2007;Farrugia et al, 2015;Williams, 2015;Moseley et al, 2018). However, in this article, we will focus on the ''volitional'' or active type of imagery of musical sounds and report a psychophysiological plus neuroimaging study on imagery, listening, and performance by a professional, internationally renowned, pianist.…”

Section: Musical Imagerymentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental Effort When Playing, Listening, and Imagining Music in One Pianist’s Eyes and Brain

Endestad

Godøy

Sneve

et al. 2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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We investigated "musical effort" with an internationally renowned, classical, pianist while playing, listening, and imagining music. We used pupillometry as an objective measure of mental effort and fMRI as an exploratory method of effort with the same musical pieces. We also compared a group of non-professional pianists and non-musicians by the use of pupillometry and a small group of non-musicians with fMRI. This combined approach of psychophysiology and neuroimaging revealed the cognitive work during different musical activities. We found that pupil diameters were largest when "playing" (regardless of whether there was sound produced or not) compared to conditions with no movement (i.e., "listening" and "imagery"). We found positive correlations between pupil diameters of the professional pianist during different conditions with the same piano piece (i.e., normal playing, silenced playing, listen, imagining), which might indicate similar degrees of load on cognitive resources as well as an intimate link between the motor imagery of sound-producing body motions and gestures. We also confirmed that musical imagery had a strong commonality with music listening in both pianists and musically naïve individuals. Neuroimaging provided evidence for a relationship between noradrenergic (NE) activity and mental workload or attentional intensity within the domain of music cognition. We found effort related activity in the superior part of the locus coeruleus (LC) and, similarly to the pupil, the listening and imagery engaged less the LC-NE network than the motor condition. The pianists attended more intensively to the most difficult piece than the non-musicians since they showed larger pupils for the most difficult piece. Non-musicians were the most engaged by the music listening task, suggesting that the amount of attention allocated for the same task may follow a hierarchy of expertise demanding less attentional effort in expert or performers than in novices. In the professional pianist, we found only weak evidence for a commonality between subjective effort (as rated measure-by-measure) and the objective effort gauged with pupil diameter during listening. We suggest that psychophysiological methods like pupillometry can index mental effort in a manner that is not available to subjective awareness or introspection.

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“…Consistent with this view, patients with VHs in Parkinson's disease have been shown to have elevated visual imagery strength compared to controls (Shine et al ., 2015). While some progress is being made in understanding musical hallucinations as misattributed ‘inner music’ (Fernyhough, 2016; Moseley et al ., 2018), it is more challenging to envisage an inner tactile sense (‘inner touch’) or inner olfaction (‘inner smell’) that could be misattributed to an external agency in the case of hallucinations. While voluntary and involuntary somatosensory and olfactory imagery (in the absence of actual sensations) are plausibly involved in typical human experience, these kinds of imagery remain only weakly understood from an empirical perspective, suggesting another way in which a modality-general approach to hallucinations might stimulate research.…”

Section: Misattribution Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modality-general and modality-specific processes in hallucinations

Fernyhough

2019

Psychol. Med.

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There is a growing recognition in psychosis research of the importance of hallucinations in modalities other than the auditory. This has focused attention on cognitive and neural processes that might be shared by, and which might contribute distinctly to, hallucinations in different modalities. In this article, I address some issues around the modality-generality of cognitive and neural processes in hallucinations, including the role of perceptual and reality-monitoring systems, top-down and bottom-up processes in relation to the psychological and neural substrates of hallucinations, and the phenomenon of simultaneous multimodal hallucinations of the same entity. I suggest that a functional systems approach, inspired by some neglected aspects of the writings of A. R. Luria, can help us to understand patterns of hallucinatory experience across modalities and across clinical and non-clinical groups. Understanding the interplay between modality-general and modality-specific processes may bear fruit for improved diagnosis and therapeutic approaches to dealing with distressing hallucinations.

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Musical hallucinations, musical imagery, and earworms: A new phenomenological survey

Cited by 22 publications

References 43 publications

Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence

Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence

Mental Effort When Playing, Listening, and Imagining Music in One Pianist’s Eyes and Brain

Modality-general and modality-specific processes in hallucinations

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