Hey, you ever had an earworm?

You know what those are, right?

A part of a song that kind of gets stuck in your head and you can't get rid of it.

Well, imagine an endless earworm.

Only, it's not a song you've ever heard before.

It keeps changing and it never, ever goes away.

I'm Patty Steele, the earworm that changed an Academy Award winner's life. That's next on the backstory.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. The backstory is back. Music is a funny thing. Songs get stuck in your head, even when you don't want them to. They fill you with emotion, love, sadness, longing, even anger and jealousy. But imagine music running through your head constantly, music you don't recognize or know what to do with, and you can't make it go away. It sounds like a setup for somebody

slowly being driven insane, right? Well, this actually happened to Academy Award-winning actress

Mary Steenbergen. In 2007, she had some minor surgery on her arm, but she had to undergo

general anesthesia to get it done. When she woke up, her brain had changed.

Her brain function felt bizarre.

It had become something she didn't recognize.

She felt odd the moment she started to emerge from the fog of the anesthesia.

She says her brain was filled with music.

Every thought, every sound, things people said to her, even things she saw became musical.

It sounds nice, right?

But not so much.

She said she'd even look at a street sign and it would become music in her head.

Her brain was only music.

At first, the whole experience was suffocating, she said, an upsetting, constant,

involuntary sort of musicality. And it wasn't pleasant. It was annoying and scary.

...