Why You Can’t Get That Song Out of Your Head
Some songs get stuck in our head more than others, and scientists have uncovered what makes them so irresistible.
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
You know that feeling when you just can’t get a song out of your head—just a short part of it playing over and over? Right now my brain is chewing on the Muppet Show theme ’cause I just watched a live-stream charity event where a bunch of my favorite comedians, including some from Dropout, which longtime listeners know I’m a huge fan of, did a onstage reading of The Muppet Show, so right now it’s just, you know, “It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights,” over and over again. So thanks for that, folks.
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You’ve probably dealt with your own share of earworms. In fact, in a few previous episodes, I asked all of you to send in some of your favorite or most infuriating examples, and a whole bunch of you were kind enough to sing into your phones for us.
Here’s Kerry from New Orleans.
Kerry: I have had this earworn in my head for literally at least 20 years before I go to bed at night—Whitney Houston.
[CLIP: Listener Kerry sings the chorus of “I Want to Dance With Somebody,” by Whitney Houston.]
Feltman: And a listener named John shared this classic.
[CLIP: Listener John sings the chorus of “Wonderwall” by Oasis.]
Feltman: And here’s Jim from Massachusetts.
[CLIP: Listener Jim imitates the music in “Angry Again” by Megadeth.]
Feltman: Why do these songs get stuck in our noggins? And how can we get rid of them? To answer these questions I’m joined today by Scientific American senior editor Josh Fischman, who’s been taking a deep dive into the psychology of earworms.
Hi, Josh!
Josh Fischman: Hi, Rachel. Hey, thanks for having me here.
Feltman: Of course, happy to have you. So do you get earworms?
Fischman: I am incredibly [laughs] prone to earworms. And I’m not musical; I am a failed flute player, and believe me, you really don’t wanna hear me sing. But I always seem to have this musical soundtrack in the back of my head.
Feltman: Can you give me an example?
Fischman: Oh, Rachel—you’re going to be sorry that you asked that.
[CLIP: The introduction of “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede fades in.]
Fischman: That song, of course, is the 1974 hit “Hooked on a Feeling” by the band Blue Swede. And it seems like it’s there for me once or twice every week. And once it’s on it doesn’t go away for days.
Feltman: [Laughs] Yeah, a classic earworm, for sure. And I think, regardless of folks’, you know, musical history or taste, since the first Guardians of the Galaxy came out, I think probably the, the number of people who have that stuck in their head on any given day has gone up exponentially [laughs].
Fischman: Yeah, I—thanks for that movie and, you know, Peter’s mixtape for bringing that back for me, a lot.
Feltman: So one thing I’m curious about is how common earworms actually are.
Fischman: That’s a great question. It doesn’t have a hard-and-fast answer, though, because there’s no one giant, definitive population study. But lots of smaller ones say earworms are, in fact, really common.
Kelly Jakubowski: The vast majority of times we have earworms, they’re songs that we, you know, we remember well, that we’ve learned and have known before, and so on, and so earworms are a really interesting way to kind of provide sort of everyday insight into the workings of musical memory and how our memories sometimes, often kind of spontaneously, present us with these tunes and why they come to mind and what does it all mean.
Fischman: Now, Kelly says these sneaky little critters may be windows—or tiny microphones—into how memory works.
Feltman: I’m really curious about those triggers. You know, why, for instance, does the “Ooga-Chaka” song keep [laughs] coming back to you?
I talked to another earworm researcher about the way that that works.
Evans: Victoria Williamson and a large team of researchers out of Goldsmiths, University of London, had a, a really clever way of finding a really big dataset of people reporting their earworms and where they came from. They realized that there was a BBC radio drive-time show where the DJ would ask people to call in when they had an earworm and tell ’em what their earworm was and why they had it, and then they, the DJ, would play the song.
They were able to use that to generate this sort of theoretical model of where earworms come from, and one of the most common triggers is having heard a song recently, but then various types of thematic association was also, like, a major—you know, someone sees a license plate, and there’s a set of letters in there that sort of looks like the word “purple,” and it’s raining, and that makes them think of “Purple Rain,” and suddenly they have Prince stuck in their head.
[CLIP: “Purple Rain” by Prince]
Fischman: So maybe that jibes with my experience. Actually, I mentioned the “Ooga-Chakas” song to Matt, and he said …
Evans: That’s gonna be stuck in my head now.
Feltman: Yeah, I have to admit that when I looked at your outline to get ready for this episode and I saw that you were gonna mention that song, I was like, “Oh, no, I’m cooked [laughs]; it’s gonna be ‘Ookga-Chaka’ all day for me [laughs].”
Fischman: Oh, sorry!
Feltman: I mean, you know, who among us could possibly stop that feeling?
Fischman: I’m high on believing that, Rachel.
Matt went on to say that that’s not the only kind of trigger.
Evans: Being in a certain mood could be a trigger for a certain earworm. A person would report that they were feeling sad, for example, and that feeling of sadness they associated with a certain song, and that song got stuck in their head.
Feltman: Okay, so just a pause to do a tally of triggers here. So far we have three: There’s having heard a song recently, which, of course, makes sense. Then there’s also an association with something nonmusical you see or hear. And then there’s your mood, like sadness or happiness. Are there any more triggers we know about?
Nick Davidenko: Mind wandering or, like, taking a walk or—there’s a certain kind of daily things that seem to maybe not involve too much cognitive load or too much thought or effort where earworms are more likely to sort of come up or maybe more likely to be noticed.
Fischman: So what Nick means by cognitive load is what you and I might call focus, Rachel. So if you’re concentrating hard on something—I don’t know, for me, that might be rewiring an electrical outlet on my house, which makes me nervous; that’s almost literally a load on my mind. It takes a lot of …
Feltman: Mm.
Fischman: Mental resources. That’s a situation where I don’t hear music in my head.
Feltman: See, I’m the kind of freak who hears, like, “The Final Countdown” when I’m doing something stressful. Just [imitates the beginning of “The Final Countdown” by Europe].
But I do get what you mean [laughs] ’cause when I really need to knuckle down and focus on something, I actually tend to put on really repetitive instrumental music, specifically to keep my internal radio from turning on and distracting me, so it makes sense that the opposite situation—where you’re kind of just mentally meandering or ruminating on something—is, like, prime time for earworms. You know, our minds are free to latch on to things, including songs we’ve maybe heard throughout the day.
Fischman: Yeah, exactly, and it’s not just outside influences—Kelly points out that certain musical features of the song itself can make it particularly earworm-worthy.
Basically, we looked at pop songs that were really frequently named as earworms in a big survey compared to comparable pop songs that had never been named as earworms even once in this big survey. We found that earworm songs tended to be faster in tempo than the non-earworm songs. These tended to be around sort of 124 beats per minute as a sort of average tempo; obviously there was some range around that.
Something interesting about that tempo range is that it kind of aligns quite well with what we call the sort of spontaneous preferred tempo for humans.
Fischman: Basically, Kelly says, that’s the speed that we kind of like to move at or to dance at.
Feltman: That’s cool. Listeners, if you don’t have a great reference point for BPMs, that’s about two beats per second, which is, like, pretty snappy.
Fischman: Now, remember, she said around 124 beats, so there’s a lot of variation, but the big takeaway, just like you said, was that up-tempo songs get named as earworms by more people, like this one.
[CLIP: “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga]
Feltman: That’s Lady Gaga, of course, with “Bad Romance,” a frequent earworm resident [laughs] for me.
Fischman: Yeah, and it was a huge hit, too. And she’s very close to 124 beats per minute there. But her chorus also shows another very earwormy feature: the melody of it rises and falls in a regular pattern—it goes up, and it goes down. Kelly says that regularity may help us recall the song more easily.
Feltman: Totally, yeah, I mean that little hook with the “ooh la las” and whatever—there’s a lot of stuff in that song that seems really primed to get stuck in at least my head.
So what do I do if that song is in my brain for the next three days and, as much as I love Lady Gaga, I want it gone?
Fischman: Yeah, totally hear you. So earworm control is such an interesting area. Actually, all the scientists I spoke with pointed out that in surveys, most people say they like their earworms; only about a third say they’re bothered by them.
Feltman: Okay, so why do we tend to talk about them in such a negative light? I mean, you rarely hear someone say, “Oh, I’ve got this cool song in my head today, and that’s so great.”
Feltman: Mm.
Fischman: We’re more likely to pay attention to negative experiences, things that irritate us, so we react to the bad earworms and the good ones happily play in the background, giving us a bit of joy when we stop and notice them.
Feltman: Yeah, I, I buy that. But if I do have a bad one, what can I do about it?
Fischman: I went back to Nick Davidenko for that one. Nick has a interesting perspective on this because he always has an earworm.
Davidenko: Yeah, it’s true. As far as I can remember, even as, as a kid, I rarely experience moment of where there is no music in my head, unless I’m actively talking, for example.
It’s a little bit random: it can be popular music, less often classical music but jazz, kind of genre of music that I listen to or that I like or that I play is a candidate—or even music I don’t like or, you know, theme song from a TV show or a commercial.
Feltman: Oh, wow. I’m not quite at that level, but I do hear music in my head more often than not, and I’ve honestly never stopped to think about how normal that is, and it’s usually benign or even enjoyable, but there are definitely times when it gets annoying. So what does Nick do to make it stop?
Davidenko: At some point try to jump on to another song. So it could be a related song, harmonically or melodically, or it could be a completely different song, but it helps to be another song that can get stuck in my head.
So it, it’s a trade-off, right? If you’re finding yourself kind of tired of having a specific song, I have to trade it for another song, so I might as well trade it for something that’s gonna be different enough and, and sort of strike a different part of my brain than whatever song that was.
Fischman: And Kelly endorsed that idea.
Jakubowski: Like, switch your mental radio—so imagine a song that you really do like or listen to some other music. It’s very, very hard to listen to music and have a song stuck in your head at the same time; those two things use very similar neural resources in our brain, so imagining music essentially uses very similar capacities to hearing music, so it’s pretty effective to block out an earworm.
Fischman: There’s one final strategy sussed out by some scientists at the University of Reading in England: chew gum.
Feltman: Really?
Fischman: I had to get Kelly to explain that one to me. But apparently this works. It has to do with something called subvocalization.
Essentially, when we think of lyrics or spoken words we subconsciously rehearse saying them—not to the point of moving our jaws but before that—kind of rehearsing the nerve signals that will move your jaws and your throat in the desired pattern. But chewing also involves those nerve signals, and they interfere with the word-rehearsal signals.
Here’s Kelly.
Jakubowski: Chewing gum actually ties up what we call the sort of articulatory-motor planning system. So in order to mentally rehearse words or songs, we need to actually, essentially, sort of mentally sing them. So if you’re using your mouth, you can’t actually kind of fully mentally sing them.
So what they found is that when people chewed gum vigorously, they had fewer earworms of a song that they had heard earlier in the experiment. I think the “vigorously” thing is key; I suppose if you kind of start chewing the gum to the beat of the music, that might not really help [laughs].
Fischman: So, Rachel, I guess you can’t play an earworm and chew gum at the same time.
Feltman: [Laughs] Honestly, that sounds like a challenge to me, but I’ll have to give it a try the next time I find myself stuck with an earworm that I, like, really can’t shake—something really annoying, you know? If only we had an example of something like that …
[CLIP: Listener Jesse sings “Baby Shark.”]
Fischman: Hey, Rachel, I’m digging out the worms right along with you.
Feltman: [Laughs] That’s all for today’s episode. But before we sign off, here are a few more earworms from our lovely listeners.
[CLIP: Listener Sarah vocalizes.]
[CLIP: Listeners Sarah and Andy sing the first verse and chorus of “Scotty Doesn’t Know” by Lustra.]
[CLIP: Listener Andrea sings part of “Holiday Road” by Lindsey Buckingham.”]
Feltman: Thank you to Sarah from New Mexico, Andy and Sarah from Alaska, and Andrea from Kentucky for those submissions.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. She previously founded the blog Speaking of Science for the Washington Post.
Josh Fischman is a senior editor at Scientific American who covers medicine, biology and science policy. He has written and edited about science and health for Discover, Science, Earth, and U.S. News & World Report. Follow Josh Fischman on Twitter.
Fonda Mwangi is a multimedia editor at Scientific American. She previously worked as an audio producer at Axios, The Recount and WTOP News. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and public affairs from American University in Washington, D.C.
Source: www.scientificamerican.com