We’ve all had it, that one song stuck in our head all day that we just can’t get rid of. This phenomenon is called an earworm. Some classic songs you may think of with catchy tunes may include “Call Me Maybe”, “Who Let the Dogs Out”, and “The Final Countdown”, just to name a few (I’m really sorry if that made those songs get stuck in your head). According to a study by Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, “more than 91 percent of people reported having an earworm at least once a week, while about a quarter had them more than once a day.” The study also says that the usual earworm is a bit from the chorus of the song and lasts around eight seconds.
No one is really sure why we get songs stuck in our head. Some scientists believe that it is because when we listen to music we are actively participating. “There’s a lot of activity in the motor planning regions,” says Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.
Another hypothesis is that we almost guess the next note of a song subconsciously in our heads, “when you’ve heard [a song] the fourth or fifth time, [one] note carries with it just so clearly the implications of the next note. You can almost feel exactly what’s going to happen next,” says Margulis. In other words, the notes we anticipate next we keep imagining in our heads are the ones that get stuck. We want to remember the song, so we try and remember the notes, and then we can’t forget them.
Basically, it’s like your brain is singing inside your head. Victoria Williamson, a visiting professor at Switzerland’s Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and a fellow at the University of Sheffield, maintains that despite us hating our earworms, most of our experiences are neutral or positive. “We’re more inclined to remember the things that annoy us,” she says. “So if you ask somebody about an earworm, they’ll tell you about the one that annoyed them yesterday. They won’t tell you the three or four they briefly had in their head which they didn’t really notice, or [which] just kept them company as they walked around.”.
It’s kind of crazy to think about earworms. Our brains are singing to us all the time. So the next time you start thinking the beat to Seven Nation Army at a Penn State football game all day, don’t be upset about it, just think how cool it is to have your brain sing to you!
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm