The world may never be short of one precious resource: earworms. Songs or little catchy tunes that stay with you even if you only heard them once.
In an essay written for The Conversation, Emery Schubert, a professor at the Empirical Musicology Laboratory at the UNSW Sydney School of the Arts and Media, calls them by their more scientific name: “involuntary musical imagery.”
Earworms affect over 90 percent of people and happen thanks to your brain’s frustratingly efficient music organization system. Professor Schubert says our brains break music into fragments, organizing them into “pockets” of memory that get stitched together with use.
Some of those fragments (usually the catchiest parts of songs) repeat themselves immediately and seemingly unendingly. This infectious repetition is what fuels the loop in your head that an earworm creates. But none of that is why it gets stuck in your head.
The same part of your brain that activates when you’re zoning out or in the midst of a vivid daydream is responsible for that. It’s called the default mode network. That portion of your brain doesn’t care about the full song or the context that the little snippet exists within. It just grabs the catchiest, snappiest fragment, and it loops it endlessly like a scratched record.
That’s why earworms attack when you’re doing those day-to-day zone-out kind of tasks, like brushing your teeth, when you’re vacuuming, or on your commute to work. Your brain goes into an almost meditative state, at which point the default mode network takes over and just spits out that one catchy thing you heard the other day.
Sometimes you don’t mind. Sometimes the default mode network puts on repeat a portion of a song that you love and can’t get enough of. Other times, it repeats the course of “Cotton Eye Joe” until you think about sawing off your own head. Luckily, Schubert has tips and tricks for getting that song out of your head.
The default mode network is something that usually functions when you’re on your own. So, if you sing the song out loud to other people, making it more social than solitary, then that might fend off the default mode from activating.
Another tactic he recommends: swap it out with another slightly less catchy tune, particularly one that is kind of boring. He recommends the kind of public domain songs that kind of wash over us when we hear them, like Happy Birthday — songs a lot of us know through rote repetition, but it’s that repetition that might blast the old song out of there.
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