Can't get a song out of your head? Try chewing gum or doing an anagram.
Nearly everyone gets earworms: short loops of music that replay uninvited, usually just 15 to 30 seconds long. Researchers have found that they feed on the same mental machinery you use to rehearse sounds silently. Occupy that machinery, with a puzzle or even a stick of gum, and the loop tends to fade.
The word is a translation of the German Ohrwurm; its earliest known use in English is in Desmond Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway. Psychologists call the experience involuntary musical imagery, and it is one of the most common kinds of unbidden thought. By one researcher's estimate, 98 per cent of people get them. Men and women get them equally often, though in that research women's lasted longer and annoyed them more. Songs with lyrics seem to be the usual culprits.
Studies suggest a typical earworm is a fragment of 15 to 30 seconds rather than a whole song, and that people with a strong interest in music get them more. At Goldsmiths, University of London, Vicky Williamson found that they are often triggered by recent listening, but also by anything that jogs the memory of a tune: a word, a few notes, or a mood associated with it. The songs people reported had little in common except popularity.
What helps? Researchers at Western Washington University found that moderately demanding tasks that engage working memory, such as anagrams, puzzles or reading, stopped earworms and made them less likely to return. In 2015 a team at the University of Reading reported that chewing gum helped too, apparently by interfering with the silent inner rehearsal the brain uses to replay music. Because an earworm is usually a fragment, some people find that listening to the whole song through breaks the loop. Others swear by a 'cure song'; 'God Save the King' and 'Happy Birthday' are popular choices.
Writers have long been fascinated. Mark Twain's 1876 story 'A Literary Nightmare' imagines a jingle you can only get rid of by passing it to someone else, and in E. B. White's 1933 satire Uruguay conquers the world by broadcasting an unstoppable tune from pilotless planes.
Source: Wikipedia — Earworm · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
