Writing By Laura

My parents and I often have random conversations (as I’ve established, especially here). This post is about a random conversation about earworms. Warning: You will probably have a song going through your head by the time you finish this post (i.e. an earworm 🐛).

I’ve hinted that I was in an accident a little over a year ago and in it I suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Because of that I have extreme hearing loss (it’s complicated and I kind of explain it on my other blog here) and I can’t hear music (it’s a real bummer that I can get really sad about but I try not to let myself). Since I used to be hearing I used to experience the dreaded “earworm” 🐛where you hear a song once and it plays on repeat in your head on a loop for a few days until you hear something new (usually).

I still experience earworms 🐛 now even though I’m not hearing music. They just get triggered a little differently. My brain works on memories: so memories of songs, movies, commercials, etc. And those memories trigger earworms 🐛 of songs and sounds of the past.

During the Olympics Procter & Gamble debuted a new commercial & new campaign featuring a song I knew back from when I could hear music. 🎶

I knew the song they used because the commercial features closed captions (I wish more commercials featured closed captioning consistently). The song is “O-o-h Child” by The Five Stairsteps (1970). The campaign is kind of genius. The following statement is from P&G’s YouTube channel: “#LoveOverBias Imagine if the world could see what a mom sees. When the world sees difference, a mom sees boundless potential. For the Winter Olympics 2018, we’re honoring a mom’s role in helping her kids overcome the worlds bias.” And the lyrics of the song work perfectly to match that idea:

🎶 ” Ooh-oo child/ Things are gonna get easier/ Ooh-oo child/ Things’ll get brighter/ Ooh-oo child/ Things are gonna get easier…” 🎶

So I’ve been having that song going through my head on a loop for a week. And as I was mentioning this to my parents since I don’t take in any new audio (especially music) earworms 🐛 tend to stay in my noggin for a very long time. (I had a Sheryl Crowe song going through my head for over 6 months.)

So if you have any good songs you think I would have heard before September 2016 (the time of the accident) that I might like to hear on my earworm loop let me know (don’t be cruel and say bad songs on purpose).

On a side note, did you see that 17 year old kid from Colorado surprisingly win a Gold Medal 🥇 in Snowboarding Slopestyle 🏂? His name is Red Gerard (no he doesn’t have red hair, that’s anothersnowboarder, it’s short for Redmond ) and it was such a feel-good moment it was great! But apparently he swore when he won. They obviously didn’t caption that so I didn’t catch it and my parents didn’t hear it. But you can read about it and see him react to winning here and watch the winning move here.