How to kill an earworm

If earworms - songs that play in your head - drive you crazy, you'll welcome clues for how to eradicate them that come from a new study by psychologists at Western Washington University, USA.

First - and I realise this doesn't sound appealing - try to avoid songs that you like. The new research suggests they are most likely to become lodged in your head (contrary to the myth that it's obnoxious songs with most earworm potential). If you must listen to a favoured song, check to see if it starts playing in your head right afterwards. If it does, then it's well on its way to becoming an earworm. This is a particular risk is you find that only a part of the song plays in your head.

Ira Hyman Jr. and his colleagues believe this last detail may be a manifestation of the classic Zeigarnik Effect, whereby incomplete tasks remain in memory but evaporate once completed. In the case of earworms, the researchers propose that the playing of only a part of a song in your head leaves it incomplete and thereby increases the likelihood that it will return against your will as an earworm. This insight suggests that one way to squash a developing earworm is to make sure, once a song starts playing in your head, that you see it all the way through (perhaps you will need to listen to the track again to ensure this is possible).

Finally, after listening to music, try to avoid mental tasks that are either too easy or too difficult. Any kind of activity that increases your mind-wandering will also provide fertile ground for an earworm to develop. In the same vein, engaging in an absorbing task will tie up your mental resources and deny the earworm the chance to grow.

These insights are based on a survey and several lab experiments conducted by Hyman Jr. and his team. The survey of 299 students revealed that enjoyable, recently heard songs were more likely to become earworms; that a huge variety of songs become earworms; that musicians experience them more often and re-experience more aspects of songs.

In the experiments, dozens of students listened to and rated three songs by the Beatles and by more contemporary acts like Gaga (ostensibly as part of a completely different research study), then they completed a puzzle task. Afterwards they revealed whether any of the songs had started playing in their heads, and 24 hours later they reported whether the songs had returned as earworms.

Overly challenging sudoku or anagram tasks helped breed more earworms (the former more so than the latter). Beatles songs were just as likely to become earworms as modern hits. Songs played later in the experimental session (therefore more recently heard) were more likely to become earworms; and a song that started playing in the head soon after listening was more likely to become an earworm over the next 24 hours. Only playing part of songs to students, as opposed to the whole track, did not increase the risk of earworms.

"Songs frequently come to mind as intrusive thoughts, and intrusive song cycles are easy to start in both naturalistic and laboratory situations," the researchers said. "In our experimental studies, we have documented that intrusive song cycles are easy to start and manipulate. Therefore, songs may provide a valuable tool for examining why intrusive thoughts occur and how to control intrusive thought cycles."

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Hyman, I., Burland, N., Duskin, H., Cook, M., Roy, C., McGrath, J., and Roundhill, R. (2012). Going Gaga: Investigating, Creating, and Manipulating the Song Stuck in My Head. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.2897

--Further reading--
Hearing music that isn't there
A natural history of the Earworm - the song that won't get out of your head
What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?


Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Feast

Tuck into our round-up of the latest and best psych and neuro links:

" up to one-third of patients who consult with neurologists typically have symptoms that are not fully explained by neurological damage" Vaughan Bell with a fascinating overview of what we do and don't know about hysteria or "conversion disorder".

Newly posted TED talk - Susan Cain on the power of introverts.

Why do we sometimes get songs (earworms) stuck in our heads? Check here for our earlier coverage of earworm research.

After a replication failure in another lab, John Bargh defends his 1996 study that showed non-conscious exposure to the concept of ageing led participants to walk more slowly.

Sleep less and waste more time online: the temptations of cyberloafing - from our sister blog, The Occupational Digest.

James Flynn previews his forthcoming book "Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ and the Twenty-First Century.”

" ... the neural basis of metacognitive behaviour: what happens in the brain when we think about our thoughts and decisions or assess how well we know something?"

Why we have cumulative culture but chimps and monkeys don't. Ed Yong reports on a study that compared how groups of children, chimps and capuchins attempted to complete the same puzzle-based task (it's the first time researchers have compared the performance of three species on the same task).

Free sample chapter from new edition of BPS-approved social psych textbook.

Jonah Lehrer and Charles Fernyhough discuss what novelists can learn from neuroscience.

Why The Future of Neuroscience Will Be Emotionless - interesting blog post by Sam McNerney on the neuroscience of emotions.

Wiley-Blackwell have brought out a psychology app for iPhones and iPads - keep up to date with psychology blogs, new articles, special issues, conferences etc.

How Much of the Neuroimaging Literature Should We Discard?

"On average, autistic brains had many more neurons in some regions than normal brains. In the prefrontal cortex, autistic children had 67 percent more neurons than average." Carl Zimmer on the The Troublesome Bloom of Autism.

Autism Matters free podcast series.

Beautiful - a hand-painted phrenology bike helmet.

What is emotional intelligence and can you improve it?

Do dating algorithms for finding the perfect partner really work?

Welcome to Stanford University's Love Competition: The contestant who generates the greatest level of love-related brain activity wins.

With adolescence getting longer and middle age becoming elastic, is it time to redefine the stages of life?

Just what is "middle age"? - BBC magazine feature. BBC Radio 4's Start the Week explored this question and featured psychologist Claudia Hammond among the guests (her new book is called Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception).

What drives some fathers to kill their children and partners before committing suicide. BBC Radio 4's File on Four  investigated (now on iPlayer).

That's it, y'all have yourselves a lovely weekend!
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Post compiled by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

What triggers an Earworm - the song that's stuck in your head?

PYT was triggered by the letters EYC 

The brain has its own jukebox. A personal sound system for your private listening pleasure. The downside is that it has a mind of its own. It often chooses the songs and it frequently gets stuck, playing a particular tune over and over until you're sick of it. Psychologists have nicknamed these mental tunes "earworms" (from the German Ohrwurm). A study from 2009 found that they can last anywhere between minutes to hours, but that they're only unpleasant in a minority of cases. Now a team led by Victoria Williamson, in partnership with BBC 6 Music and other international radio stations, has surveyed thousands of people to try to find out the various triggers that cause earworms to start playing. Radio listeners and web visitors were invited to fill in an online form or email the station about their latest earworm experience and the circumstances that preceded it.

Just over 600 participants provided all the information that was needed for a detailed analysis. Predictably, the most frequently cited circumstance was recent exposure to a particular song. "My bloody earworm is that bloody George Harrison song you played yesterday," one 6 Music listener wrote in. "Woke at 4.30 this morning with it going round me head. PLEASE DON'T EVER PLAY IT AGAIN." In relation to this kind of earworm-inducing exposure, the survey revealed the manifold ways that we come into contact with music in modern life, including: music in public places, in gyms, restaurants and shops; radio music; live music; ring tones; another person's humming or singing; and music played in visual media on TV and on the Internet.

However, a song doesn't have to be heard to worm its way inside your head. Many listeners described how earworms had been triggered by association - contact with certain people, rhythms, situations, sounds or words - sometimes with quite obscure links. "On my journey, I read a number plate on a car that ended in the letters 'EYC' which is NOTHING LIKE 'PYT' (by Michael Jackson)," said another listener, "but for some unknown reason, there it was - the song was in my head."

Memories also triggered earworms - for example, driving along the same stretch of road that a song was first heard. And also anticipation. Another listener had "Alive" by Pearl Jam stuck in their head in the days before attending a Pearl Jam concert.

Mood and stress were other triggers. "Prokofiev 'Montagues and Capulets' opening theme. I was writing an email about a distressing subject. I suspect the mood of the piece matched my mood at the time," said an amateur musician. Another listener had Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror playing in her mind ever since she'd been thinking about the star non-stop and feeling sad (the survey coincided with his death in 2009).

A final theme to emerge from the survey was the way that earworms start playing when we're in a "low attention state", bored or even asleep. "My earworm is 'Mulder and Scully' by Catatonia. In fact I dreamt about running through woods and this was the sound track in my head," said a 6 Music listener. Another survey respondent experienced K'naan "Waving Flag" when mind wandering through a monotonous lab task.

Theoretically, Williamson and her colleagues said earworms can be understood as another manifestation of what Ebbinghaus in the nineteenth century identified as "involuntary memory retrieval". They could even provide a new window through which to study that phenomenon.

"While musical imagery is a skill that many (especially musicians) can utilise to their advantage, involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is an involuntary, spontaneous, cognitive intrusion that, while not necessarily unpleasant or worrying, can prove hard to control," the researchers concluded. "The present study has classified the breadth of circumstances associated with the onset of an INMI episode in everyday life and provided insights into the origins of the pervasive phenomenon, as well as an illustration of how these different contexts might interact."

What about you? What earworms have you experienced lately and what was the context? Please use comments to share your earworm experiences.
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Williamson, V., Jilka, S., Fry, J., Finkel, S., Mullensiefen, D., and Stewart, L. (2011). How do "earworms" start? Classifying the everyday circumstances of Involuntary Musical Imagery Psychology of Music DOI: 10.1177/0305735611418553

Link to Earwormery, the website used by the authors of this study to survey participants' experiences.
Link to previous Digest item on earworms, "A natural history of the Earworm - the song that won't get out of your head."
Link to previous Digest item: "Hearing music that isn't there."

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

A natural history of the Earworm - the song that won't get out of your head

Earworms are those songs that get lodged in your cranium, playing over and over and over. There's been surprisingly little published research on the phenomenon, although several popular science writers like Oliver Sacks have speculated about it. There's also an 'expert' in the form of Professor James Kellaris at the University of Cincinnati, but his investigations all appear to be unpublished. That hasn't stopped Kellaris' university from hosting a website devoted to earworms. And there's also an online earworm exhibition at San Francisco's Exploratorium.

Now two British psychologists, Philip Beaman and Tim Williams, have decided it's time to fill the empirical void and serve up some actual data on earworms. They surveyed just over one hundred railway travellers, students and visitors to a public garden about their earworm experiences, and they also asked 12 other participants to keep diary records for four weeks about their earworms.

Beaman and Williams found, contrary to the speculation, that earworms don't seem to be more common in people with musical expertise, although a study that actually targets musicians is needed to verify this. Instead, they found that it is people who judge music to be of more importance who are more likely to get a song stuck in their head.

Previous commentators have also tended to highlight the unpleasantness of earworms and compared them to the intrusive thoughts associated with obsessive compulsive disorder. However, the new research found that only a minority of earworms (33 per cent in the diary study) were described by participants in this way. Very few earworms recurred in the same day and most were usually gone by the next day. However, earworms did seem similar to intrusive thoughts in relation to attempts to banish them. Participants reported that most strategies, such as trying to think of another song, actually made the original earworm worse.

The researchers also looked at the typical length of earworm episodes. Approximately 27 minutes was the verdict from the diary study, and several hours was the survey result. Finally, what about the idea that some specific songs are more prone to becoming earworms than others? The researchers found little evidence for this. Different participants named and shamed different earworm songs and each individual participant tended to report a range of different songs, rather than pointing to repeat offending by the same recalcitrant tune. Instead, earworm potential appeared to be determined by amount of exposure to a tune combined with that tune's relative simplicity and repetitiveness.
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Beaman CP, & Williams TI (2009). Earworms ('stuck song syndrome'): Towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts. British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) PMID: 19948084

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.