Scientists don’t know exactly why earworms happen. Or why you’re more likely to get an earworm if you’re a woman, a musician, tired, or stressed. Some researchers think that having a song repeat in your head helps keep your mind busy when it doesn’t have anything else to do. Or maybe trying to get a song out of your head ironically causes you to think about it even more. Sometimes, when you get an earworm, your mind experiences a kind of itch. You feel a compulsive need to finish the song, and you end up repeating it over, and over, and over, and over.
Location of the auditory cortex
Location of the auditory cortex in the human brain. Click image to enlarge (Database Center for Life Science, Wikimedia Commons)
The auditory cortex is the part of your brain that is active when you listen to a song. In fact, scientists have discovered that the auditory cortex becomes active even when you just imagine listening to a song.
For example, researchers at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire played a song for study participants while they were in an MRI scanner. That’s a machine that measures brain activity using magnetic and radio waves. Without telling the participants, the researchers switched off the music. But the auditory cortex continued to light up! It was as if the participants’ brains were filling in the parts of the song that got cut off. The researchers also compared brain activity in people when listening to familiar and unfamiliar songs. The brain continued “singing” after a familiar song stopped playing. But the auditory cortex shut off when an unfamiliar song was interrupted, since the brain didn’t know how to continue.
It’s a shame that no one has found a surefire way of getting an earworm out of your head. But there’s no shortage of tips and tricks. Most of them rely on the idea that your brain uses earworms to keep itself busy. If that’s true, all you really need is a distraction. For example, one recent study shows that chewing gum can reduce the occurrence of earworms. And some people suggest singing a different song. But that risks just replacing one earworm with another… Do you have any better suggestions