This fast is not being done for religious reasons, instead it is about getting an insight into how the ever-present music in modern society affects us all. These are some of the things I've discovered so far.
1. My inner jukebox went into overdrive
Virtually all of us hear music in our heads. At the start of the experiment I was flooded with musical imagery. Repetitive tunes that get stuck in the brain are called "earworms" and currently mine is a bizarre mix including the theme tune from the movie Airplane!, Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and snippets of saxophone music I play.
This bombardment of earworms lasted for the first few days of the fast, and then it gradually settled down to something more normal.
Victoria Williamson, a music psychologist from Sheffield University, told me some people who go on silent retreats have a similar reaction. When I removed music from my life, my brain compensated for this by creating excessive musical image
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