Music that thinks before I do.

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Or something like that.

So... I was just reading a really irritating article by a guy with very exacting standards about what constituted "true art" and what didn't, and there was a lot of "Well these days, there's all these artists running around thinking they can disregard The Rules..." and so on and so forth.

And eventually I realized a song was playing inside my head. Didn't pay much attention to it until I got in the bathroom, and the song had gotten to the lines "And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained as we did in the days when Victoria reigned. They do not get drilled in a regular troupe and they think they are smart just to jump through a hoop." (From "Gus: The Theatre Cat" in the musical Cats.) And then I laughed because I realized it actually had to do with the article.

This happens to me constantly. It usually goes like this:

A song starts playing in my head. I pay no attention, don't notice any more than I would immediately notice that it's a song that was playing in real life. (Because I don't immediately interpret sensory information, and apparently even music in my head is processed by me similarly to sensory information. Which is... really interesting, I wonder how that works.)

I eventually notice it's there, but little more.

Then eventually I notice something about the song that relates directly to something I am reading, some object in my environment, etc. This happens to me constantly. It can even be like, I'll be looking around without consciously interpreting anything that my eyes see, then a song will start playing, and the words in the song match a couple of the words written on an object that I passed by a minute ago and didn't even read. Or it will be describing an object in front of me. Or matching the words of someone arguing in the next apartment up from me that barely registered (and certainly weren't interpreted at the time). Or symbolizing an idea that I was just reading about.

It's really uncanny and weirds me out a lot of the time. Oh and it doesn't have to be a song with lyrics. It just always relates to something going on in my head or my environment. What weirds me out is that, first off, I seem to treat the song the same way I treat sensory data (takes time to register, takes effort to discern words, etc.), and that second off, it's matching to other data that I wasn't necessarily interpreting at the time either. And none of this occurs consciously. It's like everything has a soundtrack. I couldn't do this on purpose if I tried.

I was going to start a post similar to this, but Firefox crashed and I forgot.

What happens with me is that I'll start signing a song without really thinking about it - not thinking it, usually. I won't actually know what the song is until I hit a particular lyric and it clicks to me.

What's different for me is that it doesn't always appear to have anything to do with what's going on in the environment. Sometimes there will be a trigger - visual or audio - that brings the song to mind, but it seems like sometimes it's just a matter of constant free association, I think.

What made me think of this the other day was that I started singing "Light My Fire" and wasn't aware I was doing this until I got to the line "Come on baby light my fire" and I realized what I was doing. I think the trigger for this was hearing a word (like untrue, liar, or fire) that I associate with the song, but I am not positive and it could have just been a random thing, like when I say "it's about power" out loud at random moments.

The exact same thing happens to me. I thought I was the only one.
Example: I'll glimpse a jar of olives out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly "Wind Through The Olive Trees" is in my head, and I won't know why until I realise that I saw the olives.
It doesn't bother me; normally I find it amusing. If anything, slightly uncanny.
The funniest example I can think of is when I was on the bus and realised that "The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round" was running through my head.

This:

I have this too. I think it's thrilling and fun. It's probably a side effect of a lifetime of music immersion (I am guessing this is a commonality amongst all who do this). It's odd how the brain will file things away for later use. My conscious mind is very linear (probably same for many people) but the subconscious isn't linear at all. It can pull musical pieces out of the mental file in a delightfully non-linear fashion that allows us to see the connection only after the music has been made conscious to our brain.

Hmm. My conscious thinking isn't very linear at all (reason#4534 I find language frustrating). It's sort of dense, multilayered raw sensory information without many (if any) idea-thoughts to "order" it into categories or concepts or symbols. A lot of people I've known who experience this don't refer to it as thought at all but reserve "thought" for ideas. My idea-thought usually feels clunky and strained, like building towers out of non-ideal random materials I find lying around, only to find they fall down whenever I'm not there or lack the energy to hold them up. They're not particularly linear either, but what they are I have no idea except they feel foreign. Sometimes I refer to sensed-thoughts as underthoughts and idea-thoughts as overthoughts, corresponding pretty well to Donna Williams's sensing vs. interpreting. 

So not sure it's about linearity. Not sure what it IS about though.