Stop the music! Battling Broken Record Syndrome


I had occasion to mention the movie “Saturday Night Fever” here in a recent column and the sound track, one of my favorites, was still fresh on my mind when I found a two-disc set of the Bee Gees Greatest Hits on a shelf at the library. I played it through only once — that was all Rebeca would stand for — but that was enough. Too much, evidently. For three weeks now, snatches from one or another of the numbers in that set have been playing over and over inside my head. 


As in, “Haaaaooooowww, could a love so right, turn out to be so wrong —”


That one mostly, which isn’t even from the movie, and just that one line, over and over, without cease. Why?


To make matters worse, I’ve been under the weather since Christmas with some kind of complaint of the personal plumbing. The doctors seem to think that several things are going on down there simultaneously, all of them with tongue-twister names, so I’ve just been calling it Humours of the Spleen, as Captain Bligh might have. 


In any case, it’s keeping me close to home — especially to the bathroom — and spending a lot of time in bed, from which I must spring half a dozen times nightly. After each one of these little trips, I slip back under the still-warm covers between the beagle and the Jack Russell terrier, all set to ease back into dreamland, but the moment my head touches the pillow, there it is again:


“Haaaaaaoooow could a love so right —”


I try to stifle it with something completely different; a waltz maybe — a little “Blue Danube,” Da da da da da, dot dot, dot dot. Or something rousing from a Broadway musical: “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plaaaaiiin — by George, I think she’s got it!”


But I can only keep this going with great effort. As soon as I take my hand off the mental Victrola, the Bee Gees return.


“Haaaaaoooow could —” 


Desperate for variety, I can only tune in more Bee Gees but, with luck, I get one from the movie: 


“Daddle-a-dat, dat-adda-dat dat dat dat, — stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive — Ah, ah, ah, ah, stayin’ alliiiiiii-ah ah-iiiiiiiiive —” (Travolta’s bell bottoms flapping around his ankles as he struts down the block headed for the paint store.) To add to the general cacophony inside my head, my teeth clack to the beat in helpless syncopation. Anybody seeing me lying there might note an occasional twitch but no one could guess there’s a disco going full blast.


I began to wonder whether other people have this curse and found an online blog by one sufferer who has actually named the condition for us. “Broken Record Syndrome,” or BRS, she explains, is the involuntary internal airing of Auditory Memory Loops or AMLs. 


“Basically, sufferers of the BRS/AML phenomenon hear short (5 to 15 second) clips of songs and sometimes phrases over and over to a maddening degree. While most of us have had a song stuck in our heads for a brief period, in those with the AML phenomenon, the noise reaches pathological proportions.


“At one end of the spectrum, for some sufferers the internal music is like a soundtrack to life and causes little or no disruption to speak of. For others, the loops occur sporadically, totally consuming their lives at times, and at other times being blissfully absent.


“At the extreme end are those who are tortured with constant, unrelenting, mind-scrambling sound loops 24/7 for months or even years with absolutely no relief. I fell into this group, along with two other women I know of so far. For over a year I never had even one minute of silence in my head. Not awake and not in my sleep. I couldn’t even hear my own thoughts. I literally thought I would go insane or die if I couldn’t stop the constant maddening loops in my head.”


And there you are. Although BRS hasn’t been officially recognized by the medical establishment, so far as I know, it occurs to me that there’s a pharmaceutical opportunity here. Since there’s a pill for everything else in America, why not one to stop the music? I can hear the announcer now.


“Are you being driven crazy by unwanted songs inside your head? New Tune-Ex with Notebegone stops that maddening soundtrack so you can think and rest normally again. Tune-Ex replaces recognizable tunes with a simple thudding sound that most users say doesn’t interfere with their thoughts the way actual music and lyrics can. Side effects may include an inability to dance. Ask your doctor if Tune-Ex is right for you.”


I’m going to start working on the formula right after I take a short nap. Ahhh, that feels good — wait — No, please — “Daddle-a-dat, dat-adda-dat dat dat dat — stayin’ aliiiiiiii-ah ah-iiiiiiive —”