Involuntary to Intrusive

People frequently experience episodes of involuntary musical imagery. Our goal is to use involuntary musical imagery to understand the reasons songs return to awareness, investigate individual differences in involuntary thoughts, and explore the features that lead some songs to feel intrusive when they invade one’s awareness. We conducted 2 studies—a survey concerning recent episodes of having a song stuck in one’s head and an experimental diary study. In both studies, we replicated other recent findings concerning involuntary musical imagery. People generally know and like the songs that get stuck in their heads, recent exposure leads songs to become stuck in awareness, and if a song begins mentally replaying it is likely to return to awareness over several days. We also found that individual differences in the frequency of involuntary musical imagery were related to the frequency of other involuntary thoughts and to individual differences in attempts to control the contents of consciousness. In a series of exploratory analyses, we investigated features that are associated with times when a song stuck in one’s head begins to feel intrusive. Both one’s emotional reaction to the song and the cognitive load occupied by the mental reexperiencing of the music were related to how intrusive a song felt during episodes of involuntary musical imagery.