Why do songs get stuck in our heads?
The middle of a Venn diagram that contains Golden Girls, neuroscience, and a 1999 radio jingle for a local auto shop that I still sing sometimes.
For the last, I don’t know, three weeks or so, I’ve been singing a song in my head. Not for the whole time, but on and off for almost a month, and not even just a single song. Two separate songs that my brain has mashed up into a kind of frankensong that comes alive as soon as I’m faced with any radio silence between the ears.
It’s as though my brain is playing its own game of CBC Radio’s Distant Cousins; Annie Lennox’s Walking on Broken Glass and the Golden Girls theme song, written by Andrew Gold and performed by Cynthia Fee.
Exhibit A:
Exhibit B:
(I’d be doing you wrong if I didn’t also include this Golden Girls gospel remix)
Seriously, this once pleasant and now torturous musical tunnel vision (tunnel hearing???) is unrelenting, despite listening to all kinds of other music all day, every day, while I work.
Let’s get to the bottom of it.
In an article from the BBC, Dr. Vicky Williamson, an expert in memory and music psychology at Goldsmith’s College in London, says that this phenomenon has taken on a few different names, including Stuck Song Syndrome, sticky music, involuntary musical imagery (IMI), and musical brain itch. Others just call the songs that live rent-free in our minds, simply, earworms.
No matter what you call it, it gets old. So why are we so susceptible to commercial jingles, TV theme songs, B-side tracks from 1977, and made-for-radio pop hits, anyway? Are some songs more likely to do it than others? Is there a purpose?
Let’s start with the science.
Hearing music triggers the auditory cortex in the brain, which works like a bridge; when research subjects in a study by Dartmouth University heard part of a familiar song, their auditory cortexes filled in the rest to complete the phrase or melody. In fact, their brains continued “singing” long after the song ended.
How Stuff Works breaks down the connection between this semi-compulsive “cognitive itch” and why our brains insist on revisiting a lyric, a melody, or a beat on repeat:
No, [earworms] are not parasites that crawl into your ear and lay musical eggs in your brain, but they are parasitic in the sense that they get lodged in your head and cause a sort of "brain itch" -- a need for the brain to fill in the gaps in a song's rhythm.
The only way to "scratch" brain itch is to repeat the song over and over in your mind. Unfortunately, like with mosquito bites, the more you scratch the more you itch, and so on until you're stuck in an unending song cycle.
Perhaps the self-reinforcing nature of earworms is more around the desire for brains to address a particular set of stimuli and reap the reward-centre pleasure of a dopamine hit when it connects a song to, say, a memory or specific thought.
Dr. Williamson says sticky songs may be part of a larger phenomenon called "involuntary memory", a category which also includes the desire to eat something after the idea of it has popped into your head. "A sudden desire to have sardines for dinner, for example," as she puts it. Or suddenly thinking of a friend you haven’t seen in years.
Some experts, like the University of Cincinnati’s Dr. James Kellaris, suggest that these songs that rattle around up there are like intrusive thoughts, or memories we’re working to suppress - the harder we work to not think about them, the more we can't help it.
There are a couple of reasons why this might happen with music, Dr. Williamson says.
For one, music is encoded in our brains in a bunch of different ways, meaning that connections to certain songs can be literally embedded in our synapses based on our relationship to them. This is what’s called “multi-sensory stimulus,” according to Dr. W.
"This is especially true if you are a musician because you encode how to play it, what it looks like on a score, as well as what it sounds like.”
For people who relate to music outside of playing it, it’s often encoded alongside specific emotions and memories. You know the feeling of hearing a song and feeling yourself be whisked away to a different time in your life? You’ve encoded those memories with that song in order for them to be more easily recalled.
So on some level, our neurons are only following the pathways available to them, and a lot of the time, those paths include efficient shortcuts, diversions, and double-backs to protect our ability to retrieve those memory files.
[“Closing Time” came on the radio and she hasn’t been the same since]
Dr. Williamson tracked earworm songs and experiences as part of her study at the now-defunct earwormery.com, which demonstrated just how individual of an experience it can be. Over the course of a few years, she collected over about a thousand responses to her survey and over a thousand songs in her database.
"When I had 1,000 earworm songs in my database, there were only about half a dozen or so that had been named more than once - that's how heterogeneous the response was.”
So despite having quite an extensive network of participants, very few songs were reported twice, but many of them had similar base characteristics that made them easy for the brain to latch onto.
I don’t know about you, but when I get a song stuck in my head, it’s a particular type of song. It normally has words and a very repeatable melody. As much as I enjoy a Bach or a Mahler, they typically don’t burrow in the same way Lady Gaga or that one Hootie and the Blowfish song inevitably does. There’s a suspected reason for that, but it’s not universal, and neither is the list of repeat offenders.
According to Dr. Kelly Jakubowski, a researcher in the Department of Music at the UK’s Durham University, the songs have to be “quite simple in order to be recalled spontaneously, but also have something a bit unique that makes the brain want to rehearse it over and over."
For the study, the researchers surveyed 3,000 people about their most frequent earworm tunes. They arrived at a set of 100 songs and then compared the melodic features of those songs to 100 other tunes that had not been named but were comparable in terms of popularity and how recently they had been on music charts.
The analysis showed that those songs most likely to get stuck in people’s heads shared common “melodic contours,” mainly found in Western pop music. For example, such songs often follow the pattern where the first phrase rises in pitch and the second falls (think “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”). The opening riff of “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 — one of the top-named earworm tunes in the study — also follows this common contour pattern.
Additionally, earworms typically have an unusual interval structure, such as unexpected leaps or more repeated notes than you would expect to hear in an average pop song, the researchers found. Examples of this include “My Sharona” by the Knack and “In The Mood” by Glen Miller. [x]
The lowest common denominator in Dr. Jakubowski’s study is that it wasn’t necessarily the specific notes, but rather how easy the song was to sing in general that indicated a higher likelihood of getting stuck in people’s heads. Dr. Kellaris seems to be of a similar mind. He says that during his own study of sticky songs, he thought some songs contained patterns and specific properties that lended themselves to being sticky. His conclusions diverted from the musicological to the psychological.
Now that his study has concluded, he says that “the phenomenon is an interaction between music and mind.” Depending on the person, any song can become an earworm if it arrives at the right time, and some people are more prone to those multi-sensory memory moments than others.
Musicians, predictably, generally experience earworms more often, but the tendency can also be attributed to other anxiety-related brain patterns:
There may be some individual differences in earworm susceptibility, as is suggested by the consistent finding that musicians have songs stuck in their heads more frequently than nonmusicians. The [research study] found that people with subclinical obsessive-compulsive traits (meaning they do not have the disorder but do have a tendency toward prevarication and worry) reported earworms more frequently than people who were less obsessive-compulsive.
The dopamine metaphor earlier is really making sense now.
It looks like there are several prevailing hypotheses, and Dr. Williamson has one that keeps it simple. She’s identified three common triggers for someone to be more prone to earworms:
Exposure. "The person has heard the music recently," she says, and it’s even more likely to stick if they’ve heard it two or more separate times over a short period.
Memory. Just like we talked about, memory is such a strong force, especially when it’s paired with another one of our senses. Running into someone, remembering a specific event, or being reminded of a song through visual cues can bring that song from 2004 or 1984 rushing back.
Stress. One anecdote from Dr. W’s study is deeply unfortunate, but a great example of brain patterns caused by stress. A woman in the research group first got Nathan Jones by Bananarama stuck in her head when she was 16 and taking a big exam. Then, on her wedding day, the same. During childbirth? There it was. Every time she experiences elevated stress, her brain follows that first neural pathway directly to…Bananarama. Oof.
As a footnote to all of this, one of the other possibilities is that this behaviour is purely functional. Dr. Kellaris has also found evidence that it’s just a way for the brain to stay busy during idle time. I guess that’s better than reliving every unfortunate social faux pas from the awkward teen years, so I’m open to the upside here.
One perspective that we haven’t talked about yet that I’m particularly intrigued by is that it’s an evolutionary trait based on what humans needed to best survive.
McGill University’s Daniel Levitin, an expert in the neuroscience of music, considers the impact of our evolutionarily recent development of written language.
Modern humans have been around for some 200,000 years, but written language may have been invented only around 5,000 years ago, Levitin says. So through much of human history people memorised important information through songs.
There’s a reason why mnemonic devices and songs are common ways to commit information to memory; Levitin says there’s a strong connection between rhythm, rhyme, and melody and memory cues that can provide added reinforcement to recall. Pairing up words with another sense or another part of the brain makes it much more likely to be locked in. Multi-sensory stimulus strikes again!
"For a very long period of time, we needed to remember information,” he says. "Information like where the well is, or which foods are poisonous and which aren't, and how to care for wounds so they won't become infected."
Cultures with deep oral traditions continue this practice all over the world to this day.
For me, though, maybe I’ll just listen to this list of most popular earworms (in Dr. J’s study) and see if mine can be defeated.
I was right about Lady Gaga being peak-earworm, by the way.
“Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga
“Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” by Kylie Minogue
“Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey
“Somebody That I Used To Know” by Gotye
“Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5
“California Gurls” by Katy Perry
“Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
“Alejandro” by Lady Gaga
“Poker Face” by Lady Gaga
That’s all, peeps! I hope this post inspires you to explore some of those tunes you’ve been humming, or throw on your favourite record from way back when. Hit play on my behalf!
In keeping with the theme of this post, I’d highly recommend watching the Netflix series Song Exploder, which features longtime podcaster, composer, and modern renaissance man Hrishikesh Hirway.
Hirway’s Song Exploder podcast is an absolute goldmine of musical gems and conversation, as he speaks to artists of all stripes, from Arcade Fire to Fleetwood Mac and Slipknot, to the composer behind the Bob’s Burgers TV theme song. The approaching 200-episode series was picked up for a four-part TV exploration of how four different artists created a piece of music from their catalogue. In the first episode, Sound Exploder follows Alicia Keys into the writing room with two other songwriters, where they develop musical ideas and find creative synergy together.
Hirway’s current podcast catalogue also includes The West Wing Weekly with Joshua Malina, Partners, and Home Cooking with Samin Nosrat. Go listen!