My freshman seminar revolves around music as communication — how we can comminucate with each other through music, how music is used to  convey messages to the public, how music is used in advertising. Most importantly, we talk about how a song can get stuck with you: whether its forever, or just stuck in your head for a little while. I often find myself humming tunes that I heard playing down the hall all day, and I wonder why. I feel the urge to sing the same phrase over and over and over… and over. So, HOW DO WE GET RID OF THEM?

According to Scientific American, “92% of the population regularly experience earworms.” For a long time, no one was really sure how to get rid of them. A new study published in October 2015 from the University of Reading in England are looking at the problem from a new angle, however: researchers at the university found that college students who chewed gum when they heard a catchy song reported less earworms than those who didn’t chew gum. According to the study, “the act of chewing gum, as with silently reading, talking or singing to yourself, engages the tongue, teeth and other parts of the anatomy used to produce speech, called subvocal articulators. These subvocalizations lessen the brain’s ability to form verbal or musical memories.”

According to Victoria Williamson, a music psychologist at the University of Sheffield in England, says that chewing gum is just part of a larger technique that she calls “distract and engage.” Surprisingly, the one of the best “distractions” for an earworm is… more music. Doing things like switching the song or playing an instrument can help get rid of that pesky earworm. The next best thing you can do isn’t far off from music. Reciting a poem or repeating a “mantra” can also help you out. Williamson says that they work by “activating the component of working memory involved in earworms, a storage and rehearsal cycle called the phonological loop.” If you occupy that part of your brain with a different activity before the earworm gets lodged in there, then you can avoid it all together.

This makes a lot of sense, but I see one new variable coming into play: What if the recognition of the impending earworm helps you avoid getting it altogether? According to Williamson’s theory, you have to recognize that a tune might get stuck in your head before you have to choose to get rid of it. So why couldn’t the realization that song might get stuck in your head and your ability to say that you don’t want it be the reason you rid yourself of the earworm? It’s a complicated thought process that would ultimately mean that playing an instrument or reciting a poem don’t really do anything, except maybe increase your chances of not getting the earworm. While Williamson’s research make a lot of sense, it definitely proves that you have to be careful when deciding which variable is the putative causal variable and which is the putative response variable.

Earworms are annoying. We all know that. But what I now know is that the common earworm affects more than just your ears. It gets lodged in part of your brain, and that’s where things get complex. While looking at different studies, I wondered if there was a way to scan the brain of someone in different stages of the “distract and engage” technique — when someone first hears a catchy tune, when someone decides they don’t want to have a jingle stuck in their head, and when they are actively doing something else — and compare them to the brain scans of someone who has a song stuck in their head. It would be an interesting sight to see what lights up where, or if anything lights up at all. Either way, it’s a complex system once it becomes a matter of the brain, which makes variables a lot harder to determine.