New Directions for Understanding Involuntary Musical Imagery

This paper addresses the state of art in the studies of involuntary musical imagery (INMI), an emerging topic in psychology. We define INMI as a private, conscious experience of reliving a musical memory without a deliberate attempt. We review the empirical literature and draw guidelines for future research on the matter. As example of a new research direction, we provide a study of how INMI relates to social interactions in everyday life based on a corpus of over one thousand open-ended survey questions. The data shows that INMI can evoke overt behavior and have social consequences. Some people found it difficult to distinguish their overt spontaneous musical behavior from covert experiences. In response to an INMI inspired music act, many had experienced socially awkward situations or were consciously trying to avoid public musical expression. In the other end, some people choose expression and intentionally try to “pass on the earworm”, even if they expected reproach for doing so. These results suggest that INMI is an instance of “involuntary music”, sometimes associated with overt behaviors and social consequences The next steps in the research on INMI should be targeted to understanding the psychology underlying this phenomenon more deeply and socially. Instead of characterizing the phenomenology on different levels, we should seek the causal mechanisms related to INMI, possibly on neural level and to differentiate the different components of INMI from each other and related psychological and psychopathological phenomena. I