Why Songs Get Stuck in Your Head

Almost everyone knows the feeling: a few seconds of a song start playing in your mind and simply refuse to stop. People call this an 'earworm', a word borrowed from German. Surveys suggest that most people experience one at least once a week, so it is a perfectly ordinary thing for a brain to do.

Earworms are rarely a whole song. Usually they are a short piece, often the chorus, that plays again and again like a loop. Some researchers link this to an old finding about memory: we tend to remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. A fragment with no ending may keep the brain trying to complete it.

Not every song is equally sticky. The ones that stay tend to have simple, repetitive melodies with one small surprise in them. Hearing a song many times, or very recently, also makes it more likely to return. Earworms often appear when the mind has little to do, such as during a walk or a shower.

So how do you get rid of one? One small study found that chewing gum helped, perhaps because moving the jaw gets in the way of silently 'singing' along. Others suggest a puzzle that is not too hard, or listening to the whole song so the loop finally has an ending. None of these works for everyone.