Riding in the car with coworkers the other day, Fiona Apple’s Never is a Promise rang through the speakers. Appropriate for the cold, rainy weather outside, it was a welcomed tune as it had been awhile since I had heard it. And as the song climaxed emotionally, my brain suddenly inserted a blip, a jarring audio artifact, even though no one else heard it.

And no, I’m not on medication (nor should I be).

The reason for this oddity is that the only copy of the song that I’ve ever had was on a mix CD that someone made for me, years ago, that I’ve almost worn out. And the glitch in the song on that copy is permanently burned into my brain to the point where I now hear the ghost of it even when the defect is not there.

I’ve noticed this not-so-phenomenal phenomenon before, with playlists or mix discs. If obsessively listening to the same tracks in a particular order, when you hear a single track on the originating album your brain expects to hear the next song on the mix CD, not the next song on the album. It really isn’t a spectacular event, and nothing that modern science couldn’t explain in a sentence or two about brain patterns and aural recognition, I’m sure.

What I’m curious about is how far this extends into the rest of one’s life. When listening, do we subconsciously insert alternate words, thus hearing something different than what is spoken? Does this ghost patterning extend to what we see visually?

Maybe it’s a simpleminded thought…