Why You Can't Get That Song Out Of Your Head

If you have been near a child, the words “Baby Shark” may be enough to make you run from the room covering your ears. Well, that annoying song stuck in your head has another name - an Earworm. 90% of us experience them a least once a week, a quarter of us several times a day, but how do they work? And how can we get rid of them?!?

Well, Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his book Musicophilia that earworms are a clear sign of

“the overwhelming, and at times, helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music”.

Earworms are musical memories that loop, repeating over and over rather than running to completion. An involuntary musical thought, they arrive without permission and refuse to leave. The more you concentrate on trying to get rid of them, the more persistently they can stay. For some people, earworms incorporate entire instrumentation (I am one of those people), and for others, it’s just the melody. Either way, an earworm generally includes a melodic section, whether it’s a guitar hook or vocals. So what about this melody makes it so catchy? Songwriters take note!

A 2016 study analysed the melodies of different earworms and found that they had some things in common;

They’re about 15 - 30 seconds of melody.
They have an uptempo beat.
They contain an unresolved melody section that allows music to loop and repeat.
Lyrics are often repeated.
Chord structures and melody tend to be generic and are often repeated too, but crucially...
With a little bit of novelty, like an unexpected shift of pitch or unusual lyrics.

In short, earworms tend to feel familiar but slightly surpass your expectation of what a song should be - this is why Baby Shark is the perfect ear….shark.

So if earworms have a specific structure, do we all have the same earworms?

Well, no! In a study where they asked 5000 people what their current earworms were, although songs played on the radio at the time did come up a little more often, very few occurred more than once. So why are our earworms so diverse?

Earworms are reported more in people who play or sing regularly or count music as an integral part of their life. One research paper found that a song had to be listened to at least twice for it to get stuck in someone’s head. The more you hear a song, the more likely it is to become an earworm. And of course, we listen to the music we like more often, so our Earworms are often defined by our musical tastes. However, the earworm is a fickle beast! In our modern world, we hear music a lot, again and again. It is no wonder the earworms that did pop up more than once are songs that are played repeatedly on TV, radio, in shops, elevators and adverts. Some of the most common earworms included Don’t Stop Believing by Journey, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga and the aptly named Can’t You Out My Head by Kylie Minogue. There has to be something going on in our subconscious with that one!

Music is all around us, where are the most common places to catch an earworm?

Earworms love to sneak in when the mind isn’t working very hard, doing a monotonous task or daydreaming, they can even burrow in when you are sleeping. It’s common to wake up with a song already in your head.

Live music is also much more likely to worm its way into our brains. There are a few theories as to why this may be; it could be because of the way you focus on the song or the action of singing along. Or it could be that because you’re physically present, the combination of both visual and auditory experience make it ‘stick’ in multiple parts of the brain and remember it more clearly. It could also be because live music is a more emotional experience and strong emotions stick in our memory.

However, the majority of studies have reported more coincidental triggers for earworms, for example, recent exposure to music or memory associations with people, sights, sounds and even emotions. Do you have an earworm for bewilderment? Or rage?

This makes sense as for most of us, music is deeply connected to our emotions. It’s this emotional connection that makes earworms so hard to shake. If a song relates to an emotional experience or a strong memory, it is more likely to become an earworm; popping up when you remember an event or even think about a future event that makes you excited. Just thinking about a band that you are going to see can bring up an earworm of their song. This emotional link might be why it’s not just songs we like that stuck in our head so much, it’s the ones we find annoying too. An experience that is stressful or annoying is more likely to stick in your memory.

So, why are our Earworm’s music but not other sounds?

Music differs from other sounds because it’s defined by repetition. Compared to other things in our lives, it’s unusually similar each time we experience it. Let’s take a random example, a brick wall is visually repetitive. But, if you’re walking past that wall regularly, it’s likely you see it from a different angle each time. Even if we stare at it for a while, the light changes and other things can interrupt that experience, so it’s not repetitive in the same way. It’s actually a relatively new thing, to be able to consume something as repetitively as we do with music. Especially now with our ability to literally carry all our music in our pockets, you can hear a track anywhere, in almost the same way each time, excluding relatively small differences in how each speaker relays frequencies. Memory is powerfully affected by repetition, so the similarity of music engraves deep grooves in our mind.

But there is more to it than that. To understand why earworms stick in our memory quite so much, we need to look at this woman, Bluma Zeigarnik. She was an early 20th-century Psychologist who realised that waiters could remember customers orders right up until their order was complete. But then, the memory disappeared. Zeigarnik did some research, she wanted to see what happened if the waiter was interrupted whilst dealing with an order. She found that when interrupted, they remembered the information for an extended period. In short, your brain keeps essential jobs in your working memory, and when that job is complete, the mind will get rid of the information that is no longer useful. But when interrupted, the brain will hang onto it until the task is complete. This became known as the Zeigarnik Effect. Remember how I said earworms tend to be songs with an unresolved section? Melody, unlike speech or other noises, is a sequence of notes in a specific pattern that your brain can anticipate and therefore complete. Think Baby Shark, you can’t leave it without the “do do do”. This is the Zegarnik Effect in action. Your brain sees it as an unfinished task. Unfortunately, in the case of Baby Shark, it’s also the easiest thing to loop straight back round and start again, which is what makes it so catchy… and so infuriating.

So, we know what an earworm is, how do you get that song out of your head?

Although 3/4 of us report enjoying our earworms on occasion, 33% say they can be annoying, and 15% of people find their earworms disturbing! I am sure some of you are here because you want to know how to get rid of them. This is split into two primary schools of thought, distraction and engagement.

Let’s first talk about engagement. In a study by psychologist Victoria Williamson, they examined over a thousand survey responses to see what was an effective method of getting rid of an earworm. Now, we just established that with the Zeigarnik Effect, the earworm emerges as a result of feeling like a song is an unfinished task. The study found that people often don’t know all the words to their earworm, therefore making it unresolvable. A successful way to remove an earworm, in this case, is engagement. Intentionally listen to the tune, even play it or sing it out loud through to its completion. If you want to try this, make sure you listen to the song all the way through and beware of songs with a fade-out!

Now let’s look at distraction. It’s all about understanding which parts of the brain are involved in keeping that earworm burrowing away and keeping them occupied with something else. The first example is a little bizarre! Psychologist Philip Beaman found that people exposed to a catchy song snippet whilst they chewed gum reported fewer earworms than those who didn’t have any gum. The act of chewing gum engages the tongue, teeth and other parts of the anatomy used to produce speech and kicks off the part of the brain involved in vocalisation, the same circuitry as the earworm, so it lessens the brain’s ability to form verbal or musical memories.

If it’s too late for gum and the song is already stuck, don’t despair! We can still use the same principle of distraction after the event. A 2012 study also found a fun cure in specific puzzles. In the study, participants would listen to a classic earworm then would be given a brain-game of a particular difficulty; some were number games like Sudoku and other word-based challenges like anagrams. With easy puzzles, the song would sneak back into the participant’s brain, and with challenging puzzles, the participants would lose concentration, and the earworm would burrow in. The sweet spot was moderately challenging puzzles, taking up just enough mental resources for participants to forget about the intrusive song. In engaging that verbal part of the brain, word puzzles also seemed to do better than number puzzles, replacing the earworm with a different verbal task. So, try a moderately tricky anagram, see how you go!

If that doesn’t do the trick, try and find something else to occupy that verbal part of your brain. Reciting a poem, reading, or just having a nice chat.

And lastly, music can be a solution too! It’s pretty difficult for our brains to focus on two melodies at once. Distracting the parts of the brain involved in music is often the most effective way. In Williamson’s study, they touch on playing an instrument as being pretty effective, but I’ve got to say, I reckon singing must be pretty good too since it’s engaging that musical and verbal part of your brain! If you don’t want to perform, participants in Williamson’s study were also able to choose a cure tune. If you go down this road, choose your cure tune carefully! If you want some mental peace, you might want to go for something that doesn’t have the repetitive traits of an earworm. However, some people will choose a song that has those characteristics deliberately. This means they can replace it with one of their favourite songs! Do you have a favourite earworm cure tune?