Are you that one person in your group of friends who completely butchers the lyrics of a song?
Mishearing a song lyric as something else is known as a Mondegreen. The term was coined by an American writer, Sylvia Wright in 1954. There are several reasons your brain hears ‘Lonely Starbucks Lovers’ in Taylor Swift’s Blank Space.
Amazingly, your emotions have a lot to do with it according to The Science of Us at New York Magazine. So for example if you’re feeling down you might interpret lyrics to be sadder than they really are. This is called Top Down Processing.
Sometimes our brains can break lyrics down in bizarre ways. Oronym is the term for a string of words that can be divided in a number of ways that all make sense. For example in the Christmas Carol Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer you can either hear it as ‘All of the other reindeer’ or ‘Olive the other reindeer’.
Another reason is that your brain is constantly trying to make sense of nonsense, so when you can’t quite make out a line in a song your mind tries to fit the pieces together in any way it can which leads to ridiculous results. According to Uproxx, the human mind can trick itself into finding a solution, even if it’s completely wrong.
It really is fascinating to see how we can be conned by our own brains.
