THE WASHINGTON POST: Why catchy songs get stuck in your head (and how to stop it)

Like a good cup of espresso, music is a sensory experience that can stick with you long after it’s gone.

Music doesn’t even need to be played out loud.

Perhaps even reading the word “espresso” put Sabrina Carpenter’s hit song of the same name - and its lyrics, “Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know, that’s that me espresso” - in your head.

Listening to the song, however, is even more potent for making you hear it afterward.

If you have ever had a song on repeat in your brain, you are not alone.

Catching an earworm - or having “involuntary musical imagery” in psychological parlance - is exceedingly common and universal.

Warning: This story is about the science of how songs worm their way into our heads. Though they are generally not believed to be hazardous to human health, some songs may be highly contagious and transmissible aurally. Others have been linked to past earworm epidemics. Please proceed with curiosity and caution. At the end of the story, there will also be evidence-based ways of deworming yourself (musically).

Music that sticks with you

Of all the sounds we encounter, music seems to be the stickiest for our brains.

While words and sounds can also pop into our head, they are less likely to echo there than songs, which tend to have a repetitive structure and looping motifs.

Speech doesn’t inherently have that structure, but poetry might. Simply repeating spoken words can make them sound musical, a phenomenon known as the speech-to-song illusion, which was discovered by psychologist Diana Deutsch.

But not all songs are catchy (even if they are good!).

The biggest predictor of whether a song morphs into an earworm is that you recently heard it - sometimes the song just continues in your head afterward, said Kelly Jakubowski, an associate professor of music psychology at Durham University.

Popular music, by its very nature, is heard over and over again.

Songs (and other stimuli) we are exposed to become more enjoyable over time, a psychological tendency known as the “mere exposure effect.”

But is popular music catchy because it’s popular or is it popular because it’s catchy?

To dissect this musical chicken-and-egg problem, researchers played songs that most people had never heard in a 2023 study.

The participants heard each song a different number of times. And the more the participant heard a song, the more likely it would be to disrupt their working memory the following day even when no music was playing - a sign the song stuck.

“If you hear songs more, they’re more likely to become earworms,” said Callula Killingly, a postdoctoral research fellow at Queensland University of Technology and an author of the study.

But the song itself mattered, too - some were simply catchier and stickier.

The anatomy of an earworm

Earworms are strange creatures, but scientists are mapping out their taxonomy and why some songs are catchier than others.

Earworm-y songs tend to be faster, Associate-Professor Jakubowski said. “People are more likely to get upbeat songs rather than funeral dirges in their heads,” she said.

But what may matter most is a song’s “singability” - how easy it is and how compelled you are to sing, even if just in your head.

“You get a song stuck in your head because you actually kind of feel subconsciously compelled to sing along with it,” Dr Killingly said. “And actually having a song in your head is kind of co-opting our working memory resources.”

Earworms tend to be simple, short and repetitive. (Popular music writ large as a whole is trending shorter, simpler and more repetitive.)

These songs have more generic melodic contours that are predictable but contain flashes of novelty and unexpected intervals that keep them interesting. And, they tend to be easier to sing, with narrower pitch ranges.

The chorus is also more likely to become an earworm, being the more repetitive part of the song, Killingly said, for example, the catchy chorus of Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley.

Earworms can occur for instrumental music but are more common for songs with lyrics.

Assoc-Prof Jakubowski noted that some top earworm songs have lyrics that have no meaning but are quite easy to sing along to. Some notable examples include “Ra, ra, ah-ah-ah” from Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance or “Baby Shark, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.” (Assoc-Prof Jakubowski has a young child and listens to a lot of children’s music, and Baby Shark is a classic earworm - we apologise).

Singing in the brain

When we hear music in our head, our brain uses many of the same cognitive resources as when we actually hear it.

Neuroimaging shows that when we deliberately imagine music, similar auditory and motor brain areas are activated as when we actually listen to it. Imagining music, however, uses more frontal brain regions involved in memory or recall, which we don’t need as much when we are listening.

The primary auditory cortex is more involved in listening because it is more directly processing the sounds coming in. But when imagining, the higher-order auditory areas become more involved, Assoc-Prof Jakubowski said.

When we hear a song, and the music stops, our brain fills in the gaps. In one study, researchers played songs such as Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones and inserted gaps of silence. Neuroimaging showed that the auditory cortex continued to activate even in the silence as if continuing the song.

And lining up with the idea that earworms make us want to sing, researchers have found that singing a song in our heads actually causes us to make subvocalisations, where we aren’t quite singing out loud but there is still measurable muscle movements in the larynx and lips.

How to get rid of an earworm

Despite the widespread perception that earworms are always annoying, most of the time people find them pleasant or at least neutral, according to diary studies asking for people’s everyday experiences.

This makes sense because we often listen to our favourite songs “and then they just kind of continue on in” our heads, Assoc-Prof Jakubowski said.

But when it’s not pleasant, the most common way people de-earworm themselves is to listen to or think of another song, according to research Assoc-Prof Jakubowski and others conducted.

Thinking of or listening to another song can help us get rid of the one stuck in our head, Assoc-Prof Jakubowski said. “It’s super hard to have two songs in your head at once because they use the same kind of cognitive resources,” she said.

The trick is picking a song that itself won’t induce an earworm.

Assoc-Prof Jakubowski said that in Britain, people sing God Save the Queen, which can take their minds off an earworm infestation while being “so boring” that it does not spawn its own earworm to replace it. (For non-monarchists in the US, My Country, ’Tis of Thee has the same melody.)

There is also some evidence that completing the earworm song could help, such as by singing it all the way to the end or identifying the lyrics, Assoc-Prof Jakubowski said.

In one 2021 study, Dr Killingly and her colleagues found that when catchy songs were truncated, they seemed to disrupt working memory more, implying they were more likely to become earworms.

Dr Killingly is sceptical, however, that listening more would make the song stick less. “I don’t know how well that works in practice because you’re then exposing yourself to the song more by actually listening to it,” she said.

Intentionally using up your cognitive resources is another strategy. Activities that require too little or too much mental effort may cause us to disengage and make our minds more hospitable for earworms. People tend to report having earworms when driving or in the shower, when their minds wander perhaps because they are bored, Dr Killingly said.

Try doing something challenging or talking with other people, which engages the same brain structures that earworms do.

But one unlikely trick holds the most promise, the researchers said: chewing gum.

Because earworms may cause us to subconsciously want to sing, they engage our vocal muscles even when we don’t produce sounds. Chewing gum co-opts and uses the same muscles and movement planning centres in the brain, so it may dampen earworms, according to a small study in 2015. (Assoc-Prof Jakubowski warns against chewing vigorously or you may find yourself chewing to the beat of your earworm.)

And sometimes, having a song stuck on repeat isn’t a bad thing.

“I think earworms get a bad rap because people mostly get the song stuck in their head that they actually quite enjoy,” Killingly said. “It’s not always a terrible experience.”

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