Appliance of Science: Why do we get earworms and how can we get rid of them?
An earworm is music that plays in your head on repeat.Â
Earworms, those little snippets of a catchy tune that gets stuck in your head and repeats over and over throughout the day. Love them or loathe them, did you ever wonder how they get stuck in your head in the first place? Or once there, have you ever desperately wondered how to get rid of them?
An earworm is a short, snippet of music, usually with lyrics, typically about 15 to 20 seconds in length. It plays in your head on repeat and without you consciously controlling it. Other names include a brainworm or stuck song syndrome and, in scientific terms, it is known as Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI).
There are a number of triggers that can lead to earworms, the most common one is to have recently listened to the song. Other triggers include memories or thinking about associated things, or even dreaming; we can wake up with an earworm already in place.
Brain imaging studies suggest earworms are connected with activity in an area of the brain connected with hearing. Instead of being saved as long term memories (or forgotten) these tunes seem to stay as short term memories for a greater length of time.
More than 90 percent of people report getting at least one earworm a week, so they are very common. Studies show that musicians and people that work with music are no more likely to get them than those of us that don’t. These investigations have found very little commonality between people that report a higher amount of earworms although they do note that people with obsessive-compulsive personality types may be more susceptible.
For some people an earworm is nothing to get bothered about, but to others they are a real annoyance, especially if they don’t like the tune, so knowing how to get rid of them can be important. Studies have suggested a number of different was to do just that; first up, it’s worth noting that we often just get a snippet of the tune stuck on repeat, the bit we know, maybe the chorus and first verse. So, rather than try to ignore the tune, it can actually help to focus on it instead. Singing the tune out loud or listening to it in its entirety may be all that’s needed to clear it from your head.
Failing that, distraction is the other obvious method of ridding yourself of an earworm. Studies have shown that distracting the mind with a puzzle can help. If you want to try this approach then try a word puzzle of moderate difficulty, like an anagram. Researchers have compared numerical and word puzzles of easy, moderate and difficult levels and the moderate word puzzles seem to work best.
A study carried out in 2016 compared the earworms reported by more than 3000 participants.Â
When analysed under a number of different musical parameters they found that the most common earworms were pretty fast pop songs with fairly generic melodies; they also discovered that they had unusual intervals or more repeated notes than expected.
The three earworms that came out on top from that study were…
… and now I imagine you can’t get those out of your head either. Time for a moderately difficult anagram.
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