This video is sponsored by Kaspersky Privacy Checker.
Brew: A 32-year old woman arrived at her
doctor’s office to address a recent uptick
in anxiety, distress, and trouble sleeping.
She told her physician that she had been
hearing a series of songs playing in her head
in a near constant loop for all waking hours.
The songs were so entrenched in her brain that
she was unable to read a book, or even participate
in conversation without getting lost in thought.
It can be a jarring, and annoying experience
to have a song stuck in your head.
Usually we can just wait it out, like when water gets stuck
in your ear, but what do you do when the chorus to your
favourite song loops in your head for months at a time?
Chill: Watermelon sugar high, Watermelon sugar high
Brew: Hey, Chill.
Chill: Watermelon sugar high
Brew: You alright?
Chill: Yeah, but I got this song stuck in my head.
Brew: Well, at least it’s a good song!
Chill: Good or bad, I still wish it wasn’t in my head.
Brew: That’s something you got in common with our case today!
As I was saying a moment ago, a 32 year old woman came to her
doctor because songs kept playing on repeat inside her head.
It got so bad that she could barely
focus on the people around her
She came to the doctor because her apparent lack of attention
was having a negative impact on her personal relationships,
and her academic performance as a psych student in university.
She was fully aware that the music was coming
from inside her head, however the songs were
not triggered by sounds in her environment.
The songs themselves were ones she was familiar with,
and they were true to the original form and melody.
Chill: What songs got stuck in her head?
Brew: Songs she liked, songs she didn’t like,
commercial jingles, fragments of instrumental
songs, and even purely vocal pieces.
The first time she experienced this phenomenon
was 12 year prior to her doctors’ appointment.
Her episodes were temporary, usually going on for
a week or so, and recurring on a monthly basis.
Symptoms weren’t so bad initially, but gradually,
over the course of 6 years, they grew in severity
and became associated with compulsive behaviours.
Chill: Compulsive behaviours?
Like what, Brew?
Brew: She tried listening to different songs with
headphones at max volume to shake loose the earworm, but
the cacophony that resulted from the songs in her head and
the songs through the headphones gave her intense anxiety.
However, if she played the same song in her
headphones that was playing in her head at full
volume, she achieved some short term relief.
The end of the case file notes that her inability to
control her brain's musical obsessions were connected
to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but even those
of us without OCD can get songs stuck in our heads.
So what’s behind this manic musical malfeasance?
Quiz: It’s an earworm!
defined as a section of a musical composition,
around 20 seconds long, that repeats over
and over in our heads against our will.
Earworms can last anywhere from hours to months.
The term itself comes from a German word,
“der Ohrwurm”, which means musical itch.
It was coined by psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert in 1979.
It’s a way that our brains search for meaning.
They usually show up when our brains are
looking for distraction, when they’re idle,
or sometimes when they’re just overwhelmed.
One is also more susceptible to earworms when they’re
tired, stressed, or have neuroses, according to
James Kallaris, a University of Cincinnati professor.
Brew: The most common earworms have notes that are held for
long durations, and with smaller pitch intervals, but this
mostly indicates which songs are easier to sing than others.
For example, I’d argue very few people get Schoenberg
stuck in their heads,
but Harry Styles on the other hand…
Chill: Tastes like strawberries /
On a summer evenin' / And it sounds just like a song
Brew: Buddy?
Chill: Oh!
Sorry!
Brew: If a song is easy to sing, has an element of
predictability, and has some kind of novel idea to make you
remember it, it’s a candidate to become a notorious earworm.
These three things are also what makes a pop song go viral.
A song that you heard recently is
also more likely to become an earworm.
A study conducted between 2010 to 2013 examining earworms,
calling them, Involuntary Musical Images, found that
“participants who were exposed to a previously unfamiliar
song six times were more likely to experience that song as
an INMI than participants who had only heard the song twice.”
The same study notes that it’s uncommon for
someone to experience an entirely fabricated
song that your brain made up all on its own.
That being said, a few “self-composed” songs
have been recorded in previous studies.
They used 58 different songs in the study,
but the most commonly mentioned earworms were:
“Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga
“Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” by Kylie Minogue
“Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey
“Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye
“Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5
“California Gurls” by Katy Perry
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
“Alejandro” by Lady Gaga
And “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga
But, like I said earlier, this study was from 2010 to 2013,
so a few more possible earworm songs have come out since then.
Let me know in the comments what songs get stuck in your head.
You do need to be careful about what information you put
out onto the internet though, even with favorite songs.
If it’s connected to something like your personal
security questions, it could prove to be a
major security risk for your online privacy.
I’m excited about today’s sponsor, Kaspersky
Privacy Checker, which gives me the brass
tacks of how secure my online presence can be.
As a creator, virtual or otherwise, I have to be especially
careful about what information I give out on the internet.
One misstep could reveal my personal information to
millions of people, like old baby pictures of me.
Quiz: It’s even harder when all of the
privacy settings for each social media
platform are hidden or specifically confusing.
If I want to lock down my Tiktok, Kaspersky Privacy Checker
walks me through how to disable the features I don’t want!
Brew: It’s also great that Kaspersky Privacy
Checker is totally free, and is an easy way to
learn what you can do to keep your information safe.
Just pick your platform, hardware, and the level of
security you want, and Kaspersky Privacy Checker will give
you all the tools you need to secure your social media.
Check out the link in the description, and get the
tools to keep your private information private.
Now if we get back to our story with the never-ending earworm—
Chill: But Brew, how does it work?
Like, I love songs that are easy to sing, and I get that
they’re catchier, but why does my brain get stuck on stuff?
Brew: Our brains use patterns to help us
understand, process, and recall information.
Before smartphones, or even books for that
matter, humans had to rely on verbal communication
and memory to retain and pass on information.
According to cognitive scientist David Rubin, humans
developed methods to expedite and simplify that process.
Things like rhythm, rhyme, repetition, and alliteration.
Y’know, classic literary devices.
For example, Homer’s Odyssey and The Iliad were originally
folktales passed from generation to generation verbally.
Since they had to be memorized, Homer and other poets
used “epithets”, short descriptive phrases before specific
characters and things, as mnemonic devices to help them
remember the words, as shortcuts to get a line to fit
into their metrical form, and to let their audiences
know that their favourite character was about to show up.
Now, 3000 years later, we’re still using those same methods
to write pop songs, and post moody poetry on reddit.
Quiz: Ok, so music contains culturally
significant patterns, who knew?
But I still don’t understand the mechanics
behind how one of those patterns gets stuck?
Brew: It all comes down to the science of memory!
Yay science!
More specifically, how our working memory functions.
Working memory can be broken down into 4 main parts;
the phonological loop, which collects acoustic and
verbal information, the visuospatial sketchpad which
collects spatial and visual information, the episodic
buffer which integrates info from the previous two,
and the central executive which controls all three.
The part that we’re concerned with
today is the phonological loop.
There are two parts to this verbal system, the “phonological
store” which holds information as a “sound image” which decays
quickly, and a “rehearsal mechanism” used to keep information
from the phonological store fresh over longer periods of time.
These two systems together form the titular “loop”.
An earworm is when a song gets stuck in the phonological loop.
Sometimes when auditory information is held in the
phonological store, the rehearsal mechanism takes that
information and repeats it over and over and over again.
Your brain is trying to keep that information fresh
so you can use it, but the problem is you don’t
need your brain to work so hard to remember it.
Quiz: Ahh brains, always working hard even
when we really, really, don’t want them to.
Chill: But Brew, you never did say that the
woman from the beginning got rid of her earworms!
Did she get rid of her earworms?
Brew: Well, her case notes that her involuntary musical
imagery was rooted in her comorbid mental illnesses,
which included OCD, so treatment for her included
pharmacological and psychotherapeutic techniques.
Earworms, for the majority of us, are benign and
they’ll go away eventually, but if you want some
tricks to get rid of one, don’t try to block it out.
If I told you, “don’t think of a pink
elephant” odds are, you’re gonna think of one.
And why wouldn’t you, that’s amazing.
Trying to brute force an earworm out of your system
by ignoring it usually just gets it stuck in deeper.
Instead, you can listen to a different catchy song to
“replace” the song you hate, or, since earworms are
generally partial bits of a song, you can listen to the
entire song to “satisfy” your brain’s need for repetition.
Funny enough, you can also try to chew
gum to get rid of a nasty earworm.
The sound of your jaw chewing is sometimes enough to
counteract the rhythm of the song inside your head!
Sometimes easy solutions aren't enough.
If you, like the woman from our case earlier, find earworms
interfering with your life and you can’t seem to get rid of
them no matter what you try, therapy might be the best option.
At the end of the day, earworms are a natural
symptom of our living thinking brains, and they’re
a side effect of thousands, no, tens of thousands
of years of evolution both biological and cultural.
Watermelon sugar— UGH
Hello dear viewers!
If you liked this video, go ahead and
hit that like button and subscribe!
I’m also always looking for new ideas so leave me a
comment below if you have any particularly good ones.