Like many people (I hope), I often have music playing inside my head. It may be a favourite song, or the theme tune from a movie, or it may be a catchy but usually irritating chorus from some TV ad.

I’ve often stopped to wonder, though why specific songs or tunes are selected by what appears to be some form of internal jukebox (like an organic version of an iPod Shuffle).

Sometimes, it may be a song I’ve not heard for over 20 or 30 years, and, as far as I can tell, not anything I’ve even thought about recently.

I accept that one of the features of the human brain that still makes it so much more powerful than the computer is its amazing ability to make connections, often between the five senses – for example, a taste may trigger a memory of a totally different experience.

And on those (frequent) occasions when I detect that my mind has been wandering, I sometimes play a game I call “How Did I Get There?” If you’ve never tried to backtrack to work out how you ended up thinking about whatever you’re thinking about, following each connection one after the other, then it’s an interesting and often frustrating exercise.

But it does illustrate perfectly the way that the human mind can form these associations between apparently unconnected events and experiences.

Anyway, I digress (again).

Even more spooky is that occasionally, like tonight, I have a song playing in my head that I’ve not heard for many, many years (Born To Be Wild, in this instance), and then only a few hours later, I hear that very song in a movie I’m watching (and, no, it wasn’t Easy Rider).

Is it coincidence, or is there something else going on?

And why is it that the tunes and jingles you often can’t get out of your head, sometimes for days at a time in my case, are the most irritating ones that you don’t even like?

And on a vaguely related noted, I sometimes have what amount to single-frame images in my head of places I’ve been, either recently, or more usually, years ago. Like the music, these often have no obvious connection to anything I’m doing or thinking about at the time.

So, what is the purpose of all this? Is it my brain trying to tell me something, or is it the random firings of neurons deep inside my brain, and if so, is this normal or do I have a few loose wires short-circuiting from time to time? And how will I ever know, for certain?

And why, again on a similar but different note, do I sometimes find myself repeating somebody’s name inside my head for day after day? Recently, it was Carlos Alazraqui (a comedian that I had seen on TV fairly recently), and before that, Tippi Hedren (and I hadn’t seen her in a movie since I saw The Birds back in the mid-1970s).

Am I suffering from some form of celebrity Tourette’s Syndrome, or am I just plain nuts?

All these questions, and no answers!

The brain works, like God (or so they say), in mysterious ways – I’m just glad that Microsoft didn’t create the software that drives our brains (aka wetware) or we’d all be pressing CTRL / ALT / DELETE every other day to do a reboot (although I do know a few people who seem to experience the human equivalent of the BSOD on a regular basis)!