14 DAY TRIAL // A paper published in a recent issue of the journal Frontiers in Neurology details the case of a 60-year-old woman suffering from musical hallucinations.
The woman also had hearing impairment and tinnitus, i.e. a constant ringing in her ears. Both these conditions have previously been linked to said form of hallucinations.
Specialists say that, oddly enough, the woman was unable to recognize the songs playing in her head.
This happened despite the fact that the tunes had not just full instrumentals, but also full vocals.
Thus, she could not say what the name of the song was, and who was performing it.
However, whenever she hummed the tunes to her husband, the latter found that they were rather popular songs.
Specialists suspect that the woman had heard the songs at some point in her life, and that her brain somehow locked them away.
The woman was unable to retrieve these memories on her own accord, and only accessed them while having musical hallucinations.
According to Live Science, the 60-year-old patient first experienced a musical hallucination during nighttime, as she was trying to sleep.
She later explained that the experience was not very different from having a radio constantly play at the back of her head, the same source details.
Although cases of people experiencing musical hallucinations have been reported before, this 60-year-old woman appears to have been the first person ever documented to hear non-recognizable songs.
“To our knowledge, this is the first report of musical hallucinations of non-recognizable songs that were recognized by others in the patient's environment,” neurologists Danilo Vitorovic and José Biller of Loyola University Medical Center reportedly write in the paper detailing this case.
“This raises intriguing questions about musical memory, as well as mechanisms of forgetting,” they go on to argue.
Apparently, the woman started feeling somewhat better after being prescribed an anti-seizure drug dubbed carbamazepine. However, the hallucinations did not entirely disappear.