Repetition As a Cognitive Device

Learning About Perturbance from Art

In this article, let’s briefly connect my previous article, "Why You Can’t Stop Thinking About Them", to the learning from stories project I wrote about recently.

Music, poetry and song are an endless source of material from which to learn about mental perturbance. They can both generate and represent perturbance, often through their use of repetition.

Repetition is not merely an aesthetic device. It is a cognitive one. It can simulate, evoke, and even induce the very phenomenon that defines perturbance: the return of the same thought, image, or concern, again and again, despite attempts to move on.

Love songs provide especially clear examples. Many portray limerence—the intrusive, persistent focus on a desired person—through repeated phrases, refrains, or motifs that mirror the structure of the underlying mental state. Consider a song like The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” (1983). The repeated lines—“Every breath you take / Every move you make”—return insistently to the same object of attention. The structure of the song mirrors the cognitive pattern of limerence: a narrowing and persistence of attention repeatedly drawn back to the same person. The repetition does not merely describe the state; it enacts it, simulating the difficulty of disengagement. Each recurrence functions like a perturbant loop: attention is recaptured, and disengagement is delayed.

Similarly, songs about grief often circle around a loss, revisiting the same absence from slightly different angles. A refrain may return with minimal variation, each time reinforcing the persistence of the concern. The listener is drawn into a simulation of perturbance: attention is guided back, again and again, to what cannot be resolved. To choose a concrete example, consider Stan Rogers’ song “White Squall” (1975). The refrain returns with the line, “Tonight, some red-eyed Wiarton girl lies staring at the wall. And her lover's gone into a white squall,” circling back again and again to the moment of loss. The repetition does not resolve the loss; it re-enacts it, drawing attention repeatedly to the absence and the speaker’s relation to it. Each return functions as a perturbant loop, reactivating the same concern and sustaining the listener’s focus on the loss.

This is one example of how we can engage in self-directed learning from stories: using cultural artifacts—songs, poems, narratives—not just to feel, but to analyze the mechanisms that generate those feelings, including the dynamics of mental perturbance.

What other songs or other stories can you think of in which repetition reflects an inability to disengage?