You’re scrolling down your tumblr dash when you see an impossible piece of news about
your favorite TV show. It sounds too good to be true, but you click anyway.
And there he is in all his glory: Rick Astley, singing about how he’s never gonna give
you up.
You’ve been rick rolled. And the worst part is, you know that song is going to stay with
you the rest of the day, a short snippet repeating itself over and over until you want to tear
your ears out.
You’ve got yourself an earworm: a repeating snippet of music, probably fifteen to twenty
seconds long, that’s playing in your head without you consciously making it happen..
But why? How do songs get themselves stuck in your head? More importantly, how do you
get rid of them?
Turns out that which songs get stuck mostly depends on the person. But psychologists have
some ideas about why your brain puts its playlist on repeat, and there are few ways to hit pause
-- including bubble gum and word puzzles.
The term “earworm” entered the English language pretty recently -- sometime in the
1970s -- by way of the German word Ohrwurm, which means the same thing.
But the actual phenomenon of getting a song stuck in your head is much older -- centuries-old
references call it “the piper’s maggot.”
To study it, scientists usually use the term Involuntary Musical Imagery -- or INMI for
short -- because earworms are linked to other kinds of involuntary thoughts.
A lot of our conscious thoughts are involuntary -- like, 30-40% of them. But psychologists
don’t know much about how they work.
Within the last five years or so, researchers have realized that earworms are a good place
to start, because they’re a little more concrete -- and therefore easier to study
-- than other kinds of spontaneous thoughts.
Which first meant figuring out how widespread earworms are, how they happen, and whether
some people get them more than others.
Earworms are incredibly common -- more than 90% of people report having them.
The songs usually have lyrics, as opposed to being instrumental. And live music is more
likely to stick in your brain than recorded music, maybe because it includes a visual
element, or because you’re all excited and emotional from seeing your favorite band right
there on the stage.
But even though having a song stuck in your head seems like it wouldn’t be a good time,
that’s not necessarily true.
Roughly three quarters of people who report having earworms actually like -- or at least
don’t really care about -- the song in their heads.
The annoying tunes don’t happen as much, but we remember them more because, well, they’re
annoying. If an experience is more stressful, it’s more likely to stick in your memory.
Which is probably why you remember that one commercial jingle. Or Rick Astley.
Now, if you listen to a lot of top 40, you’re probably going to get a lot of Taylor Swift
songs in your head. But you can’t get a Led Zeppelin earworm if you’ve never heard
Jimmy Page play guitar.
This is why earworms tend to be songs you know, and like -- you listen to them more.
You might think that certain songs are catchier than others, so they can be more intrusive.
Well, that’s an easy hypothesis to test, because scientists do know some of the characteristics
that make a song catchy.
Long notes that are close together in pitch, for example -- like in the chorus of the ABBA
song “Waterloo.”
In a series of papers published in 2012, a British musical psychologist named Victoria
Williamson led a research group that spent some time studying earworms.
They asked people to describe the songs stuck in their heads, and found that very few songs
occurred more than once.
People did tend to report songs like Jingle Bells around the holidays, and pop songs that
were constantly on the radio showed up a lot more in the answers, too.
But every other song was unique, even though they surveyed thousands of people.
So, which songs get stuck in your head just seems to depend on who you are, your musical
taste, and your personal memories.
That’s because there are a bunch of different ways to get an earworm, and some of them depend
on your individual personality.
In another part of the study, Williamson and her team partnered with the BBC, surveying
radio listeners to try and figure out what gave them earworms.
Unsurprisingly, the most common cause was recent or repeated exposure to a song. So,
top 40 and Jingle Bells.
But there were a few others too.
The researchers found that earworms can be associated with a particular memory, and calling
up that memory would also dredge up the song.
It can even work in reverse -- like, if you’re going to a concert, you might get that band’s
songs stuck in your head ahead of time.
Certain moods, like stress or surprise, can also make particular songs get stuck in people’s brains.
They also found that earworms can happen when your mind isn’t working very hard, like
when you’re daydreaming.
...or even when you’re actually dreaming, when you’re asleep. Apparently it’s pretty
common to wake up with a song already stuck in your head.
So, we know what kinds of things can cause earworms. But why do our brains get fixated
on songs at all?
Scientists still aren’t exactly sure, but they think it’s related to what’s known
as the Zeigarnik effect.
Bluma Zeigarnik was an early twentieth century Soviet psychologist who noticed that servers
could flawlessly remember a customer’s order -- right up until the order was delivered.
Once the task was done, the memory went kaput.
Zeigarnik spent time studying this effect, and found that people who were interrupted
in the middle of doing something could remember what they were doing much better than people
who were allowed to finish.
In other words, your brain works hard to keep a task that’s in progress in your working
memory. But once you’re done, it doesn’t need that information any more, so it tosses
it out.
That can help with productivity, since if you start something, your brain is going to
keep it on the front burner until you finish it. In other words, listen to Shia LaBoeuf:
JUST DO IT!
When it comes to earworms, your brain might be considering an intrusive song to be an
unfinished task.
Also in 2012, one group of researchers at Western Washington University tested this
by giving their study participants earworms. They played songs by the Beatles and Lady
Gaga, and either let them finish or stopped the song in the middle.
The songs that they paused didn’t come back as earworms more than the finished ones, which
would seem to be a point against the Zeigarnik effect. But they noticed something interesting.
If participants heard the song playing in their heads right after listening to it, it
was more likely to come back as an earworm sometime in the next 24 hours.
The researchers interpreted this as evidence in favor of the Zeigarnik effect, proposing
that the participants’ brains were treating those songs as unfinished tasks.
So, if your brain thinks it’s an unfinished task, how do you get the local car dealership’s
jingle out of your head?
A few studies have come up with different strategies.
One of the strangest ideas is just to chew gum, which might somehow interfere with the
same processes your brain is using to play the song.
Most of the others take into account the Zeigarnik effect, plus the fact that earworms tend to
have lyrics.
One survey, by Williamson’s group in the UK and a psychologist named Lassi Liikkanen
from Finland, combined data from thousands of participants and examined the way people
already responded to earworms.
They found that people tried two main things: distraction and engagement, both of which
seemed to work.
Distractions that were kind of similar to the earworm were most effective--like listening
to a similar song.
Some participants even reported listening to so-called “cure songs.”
Not, like, the band The Cure -- though that could work -- but particular songs that people
said would push their earworm out without becoming earworms themselves.
The researchers couldn’t explain why these specific songs didn’t become earworms, since
virtually any song can, but they didn’t.
Engagement, on the other hand, tries to take advantage of the Zeigarnik effect.
Lots of people know the first verse and chorus of songs, but they might not know the second
verse. So their brains can’t complete the task and the chorus gets stuck in an infinite loop.
That’s why engaging with the song by singing along or listening to it often made it go away.
Though the researchers did note that a lot of people liked their earworms enough to not
bother doing anything about them.
But it was that 2012 Lady Gaga-Beatles study out of Western Washington that had the most
interesting solution to the earworm problem.
The study was broken up into a few different experiments. In each, the researchers would
play either top 40 songs by Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga, or classics by the
Beatles in a certain order.
The participants would then be asked to solve a puzzle. In one experiment, these were Sudoku
puzzles; another used anagrams.
While they were solving the puzzles, the songs would tend to pop back into their heads.
The researchers wanted to know if the difficulty of the puzzles would make a difference in
those songs becoming earworms, and whether it mattered if the puzzles involved letters
or numbers.
Turns out that both of those things were important.
Puzzles that were too easy weren’t distracting enough to push the involuntary songs out of
people’s brains… but neither were puzzles that were too hard.
That might seem counterintuitive, unless you’ve ever played a tough level in Candy Crush and
just given up in disgust. When a task is too challenging, you can lose interest -- and
the earworm sneaks back in.
Moderately difficult puzzles seemed to hit the sweet spot, taking up just enough mental
resources for people to forget about the intrusive song.
Also, the word puzzles worked better than the number puzzles -- something that a bunch
of earworm studies have noticed.
The researchers think that’s because most earworms are songs that have words, so your
brain treats them as a type of verbal task.
But when it’s time to solve the word puzzle, your brain needs to use the same resources,
so it dumps the earworm to focus on solving the puzzle.
So there you have it: Next time you have an earworm you need to get rid of, solve a somewhat
difficult anagram.
But, in case you don’t carry those around with you all the time, the researchers suggest
just reading something -- as long as it’s engaging enough to push the earworm out of
your working memory.
And if you find yourself getting earworms a lot, there’s no need to worry. Music is
everywhere -- piped into department stores, elevators, out of your phone when you’re
on hold with customer service for two hours...
It’s no wonder we get songs stuck in our heads when we hear them constantly.
It’s also possible that we’ve trained ourselves to have a good memory for music
because oral traditions go back far longer than any writing system. For a long time,
humans used songs to remember things on purpose.
So, next time you’re hearing some 80s one-hit wonder for 36 hours straight, it’s not that
something’s wrong with your brain. It’s just really into music.
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