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Some auditory hallucinations are normal. On falling asleep and waking up, it is fairly common to think youˇve heard your name called, or less specific noises, Woodruff says.

Brain scans of people experiencing musical hallucinations show that neural activity is identical to the state of really hearing the music.¨Itˇs not like having a tune going around in your head,〃 said Adrian Rees, an expert in auditory neurology at Newcastle University.¨This is something you canˇt turn off or change to another record.〃

Can iPods make you hallucinate? If you like your answers based on proof, then this particular one has to be a firm¨no.〃 But the issue was raised this week by Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at Whitchurch Hospital in Cardiff, Britain, and expert in so-called musical hallucinations.

Just like the more familiar visual variants, musical hallucinations strike suddenly.¨People will all of a sudden start hearing a song, such as Yes, We Have No Bananas,〃 says Aziz.

Musical hallucinations are rare and usually linked to some kind of abnormal behavior in the brain, be it a psychiatric condition, epilepsy or a tumor. But Aziz says people are more likely to experience them if they go from hearing a lot of music to a quiet place in which their brains receive little auditory stimulus.

In research reported this week, Aziz studied people aged 65 to 90 and documented any experiences of musical hallucinations. Traditionally, scientists thought that hallucinations were more common among those who listened to a lot of music in childhood, but Aziz found that many of his patients were hearing more recent songs.

Aziz believes that in the iPod age, the increase in the amount of music we are exposed to will make hallucinations more common.¨We are now exposed to a barrage of music and it seems that we might well see more cases of this in the future,〃 he said.¨Weˇll only know if we test people in 20 yearsˇ time,〃 he added.

Ironically, iPods and Walkmans are used by many patients who experience intrusive musical hallucinations, says Peter Woodruff, a psychiatrist at Sheffield University.¨What they find is that by playing real music, it competes with the hallucination and suppresses it,〃 he says.

Sources say the device could be launched as early as next month. It would follow the recent United States launch of the Sony eBook Reader, a machine the size of a hardback that stores digital copies of up to 80 books and lasts 7,500 pages on a single charge.

Online bookseller Amazon intends to unveil a wireless electronic book reader — think of it as a literary iPod — that has United Kingdom publishers in a frenzy to digitize their entire range of titles.

Amazon is currently keeping its electronic book, believed to be named “Kindle” and priced at more than 400 U.S. dollars a secret and refused to comment on its existence. But U.S. industry sources are predicting an October launch for a device that could do for reading what the iPod did for mobile music.

“With Amazon and Sony both reported to be planning electronic book reader launches in the UK, we are highly positive about the market for digital books,” said Jeremy Ettinghausen, digital director of Penguin.”

A source close to Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter novels, said the company was also keen to adapt literary works to the new technology.

Ettinghausen said the public’s appetite for digital content, coupled with a wireless electronic book, will allow booksellers to offer instant digital downloads of all types of literature in cafｅs, airports and, of course, in bookshops. Penguin has begun the process of digitizing all its books and already offers a limited selection of digital downloads from its website.

Although transferring content into electronic format has resulted in heavy losses for record labels as a result of widespread piracy, Ettinghausen is confident that electronic books will not replace the paper variety but will whet the public’s appetite for reading.

He said paper books have an intrinsic appeal to their owners and also cites the way in which the start of Amazon’s Internet sales service in the 1990s preceded the opening of huge new London bookstores such as Borders in Oxford Street and Waterstones in Piccadilly. Industry predictions at the time had been that internet sales would force high street bookstores to close.