February 27, 2025Why You Cant Get That Song Out of Your HeadSome songs get stuck in our head more than others, and scientists have uncovered what makes them so irresistible. Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific AmericanSUBSCRIBE TO Science QuicklyRachel Feltman: For Scientific Americans Science Quickly, Im Rachel Feltman.You know that feeling when you just cant get a song out of your headjust a short part of it playing over and over? Right now my brain is chewing on the Muppet Show theme cause I just watched a live-stream charity event where a bunch of my favorite comedians, including some from Dropout, which longtime listeners know Im a huge fan of, did a onstage reading of The Muppet Show, so right now its just, you know, Its time to play the music / Its time to light the lights, over and over again. So thanks for that, folks.A lot of people call those annoying little ditties earworms: fragments of songs that crawl into your mind and just dont want to leave. And scientists have actually done quite a bit of research to figure out why some tunes wriggle their way into our heads better than others.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Youve probably dealt with your own share of earworms. In fact, in a few previous episodes, I asked all of you to send in some of your favorite or most infuriating examples, and a whole bunch of you were kind enough to sing into your phones for us.Heres Kerry from New Orleans.Kerry: I have had this earworn in my head for literally at least 20 years before I go to bed at nightWhitney Houston.[CLIP: Listener Kerry sings the chorus of I Want to Dance With Somebody, by Whitney Houston.]Feltman: And a listener named John shared this classic.[CLIP: Listener John sings the chorus of Wonderwall by Oasis.]Feltman: And heres Jim from Massachusetts.[CLIP: Listener Jim imitates the music in Angry Again by Megadeth.]Feltman: Why do these songs get stuck in our noggins? And how can we get rid of them? To answer these questions Im joined today by Scientific American senior editor Josh Fischman, whos been taking a deep dive into the psychology of earworms.Hi, Josh!Josh Fischman: Hi, Rachel. Hey, thanks for having me here.Feltman: Of course, happy to have you. So do you get earworms?Fischman: I am incredibly [laughs] prone to earworms. And Im not musical; I am a failed flute player, and believe me, you really dont wanna hear me sing. But I always seem to have this musical soundtrack in the back of my head.Feltman: Can you give me an example?Fischman: Oh, Rachelyoure going to be sorry that you asked that.[CLIP: The introduction of Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede fades in.]Fischman: That song, of course, is the 1974 hit Hooked on a Feeling by the band Blue Swede. And it seems like its there for me once or twice every week. And once its on it doesnt go away for days.Feltman: [Laughs] Yeah, a classic earworm, for sure. And I think, regardless of folks, you know, musical history or taste, since the first Guardians of the Galaxy came out, I think probably the, the number of people who have that stuck in their head on any given day has gone up exponentially [laughs].Fischman: Yeah, Ithanks for that movie and, you know, Peters mixtape for bringing that back for me, a lot.Feltman: So one thing Im curious about is how common earworms actually are.Fischman: Thats a great question. It doesnt have a hard-and-fast answer, though, because theres no one giant, definitive population study. But lots of smaller ones say earworms are, in fact, really common.I talked about this with Kelly Jakubowski, whos a psychologist at the University of Durham in England, and shes one of the leading researchers in this area.Kelly Jakubowski: The vast majority of times we have earworms, theyre songs that we, you know, we remember well, that weve learned and have known before, and so on, and so earworms are a really interesting way to kind of provide sort of everyday insight into the workings of musical memory and how our memories sometimes, often kind of spontaneously, present us with these tunes and why they come to mind and what does it all mean.Fischman: Now, Kelly says these sneaky little critters may be windowsor tiny microphonesinto how memory works.A lot of memorys voluntary, right? You try and remember where you parked your car or what you need from the grocery store. But earworms are involuntary; in fact, psychologists call them involuntary musical imagery. So looking at them may produce some insights into how memory works in a small way: where associations trigger memories or how mood is associated with memory.Feltman: Im really curious about those triggers. You know, why, for instance, does the Ooga-Chaka song keep [laughs] coming back to you?Fischman: Thats a great question, too [laughs]. I really dont know for sure. But there are a couple of aspects of that tune that do make it prime earworm material, psychologists have found. One is the tempo and that Ooga-Chaka repetition, and Ill get back to that later.The other might be word association. The next line after the Ooga-Chakas is: I cant stop this feeling. Now, I report on health, including psychology, so usually the word feeling comes up every day in what I read and what I talk about. So it turns out that, according to one recent study, that associations like that are a big earworm trigger.I talked to another earworm researcher about the way that that works.Matt Evans: Im Matt Evans. Im a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in cognitive psychology.Fischman: Matt told me that some psychologists figured out a cool way of developing a database of popular earworms.Evans: Victoria Williamson and a large team of researchers out of Goldsmiths, University of London, had a, a really clever way of finding a really big dataset of people reporting their earworms and where they came from. They realized that there was a BBC radio drive-time show where the DJ would ask people to call in when they had an earworm and tell em what their earworm was and why they had it, and then they, the DJ, would play the song.They were able to use that to generate this sort of theoretical model of where earworms come from, and one of the most common triggers is having heard a song recently, but then various types of thematic association was also, like, a majoryou know, someone sees a license plate, and theres a set of letters in there that sort of looks like the word purple, and its raining, and that makes them think of Purple Rain, and suddenly they have Prince stuck in their head.[CLIP: Purple Rain by Prince]Fischman: So maybe that jibes with my experience. Actually, I mentioned the Ooga-Chakas song to Matt, and he said ...Evans: Thats gonna be stuck in my head now.Feltman: Yeah, I have to admit that when I looked at your outline to get ready for this episode and I saw that you were gonna mention that song, I was like, Oh, no, Im cooked [laughs]; its gonna be Ookga-Chaka all day for me [laughs].Fischman: Oh, sorry!Feltman: I mean, you know, who among us could possibly stop that feeling?Fischman: Im high on believing that, Rachel.Matt went on to say that thats not the only kind of trigger.Evans: Being in a certain mood could be a trigger for a certain earworm. A person would report that they were feeling sad, for example, and that feeling of sadness they associated with a certain song, and that song got stuck in their head.Feltman: Okay, so just a pause to do a tally of triggers here. So far we have three: Theres having heard a song recently, which, of course, makes sense. Then theres also an association with something nonmusical you see or hear. And then theres your mood, like sadness or happiness. Are there any more triggers we know about?Fischman: Well, some surveys have asked people what they were doing when an earworm turned up. One of the most common answers is: Nothing much. And Nick Davidenko, a psychologist at UC Santa Cruz who studies perception and memoryand who works with Matttalked with me about this.Nick Davidenko: Mind wandering or, like, taking a walk ortheres a certain kind of daily things that seem to maybe not involve too much cognitive load or too much thought or effort where earworms are more likely to sort of come up or maybe more likely to be noticed.Fischman: So what Nick means by cognitive load is what you and I might call focus, Rachel. So if youre concentrating hard on somethingI dont know, for me, that might be rewiring an electrical outlet on my house, which makes me nervous; thats almost literally a load on my mind. It takes a lot of ...Feltman: Mm.Fischman: Mental resources. Thats a situation where I dont hear music in my head.Feltman: See, Im the kind of freak who hears, like, The Final Countdown when Im doing something stressful. Just [imitates the beginning of The Final Countdown by Europe].But I do get what you mean [laughs] cause when I really need to knuckle down and focus on something, I actually tend to put on really repetitive instrumental music, specifically to keep my internal radio from turning on and distracting me, so it makes sense that the opposite situationwhere youre kind of just mentally meandering or ruminating on somethingis, like, prime time for earworms. You know, our minds are free to latch on to things, including songs weve maybe heard throughout the day.Fischman: Yeah, exactly, and its not just outside influencesKelly points out that certain musical features of the song itself can make it particularly earworm-worthy.Jakubowski: I worked on a study that we published a few years ago, back in 2017, where we looked at the features specifically of pop songs that get stuck in peoples heads. And we found that songs that are at a certain tempo range are sort of more likely to get stuck with people.Basically, we looked at pop songs that were really frequently named as earworms in a big survey compared to comparable pop songs that had never been named as earworms even once in this big survey. We found that earworm songs tended to be faster in tempo than the non-earworm songs. These tended to be around sort of 124 beats per minute as a sort of average tempo; obviously there was some range around that.Something interesting about that tempo range is that it kind of aligns quite well with what we call the sort of spontaneous preferred tempo for humans.Fischman: Basically, Kelly says, thats the speed that we kind of like to move at or to dance at.Feltman: Thats cool. Listeners, if you dont have a great reference point for BPMs, thats about two beats per second, which is, like, pretty snappy.Jakubowski: Music that is at that speed seems to get stuck in our heads more often. It seems like there is this kind of inherent link between our sort of body rhythms and the rhythms of the music in our head and so on.Fischman: Now, remember, she said around 124 beats, so theres a lot of variation, but the big takeaway, just like you said, was that up-tempo songs get named as earworms by more people, like this one.[CLIP: Bad Romance by Lady Gaga]Feltman: Thats Lady Gaga, of course, with Bad Romance, a frequent earworm resident [laughs] for me.Fischman: Yeah, and it was a huge hit, too. And shes very close to 124 beats per minute there. But her chorus also shows another very earwormy feature: the melody of it rises and falls in a regular patternit goes up, and it goes down. Kelly says that regularity may help us recall the song more easily.Feltman: Totally, yeah, I mean that little hook with the ooh la las and whatevertheres a lot of stuff in that song that seems really primed to get stuck in at least my head.So what do I do if that song is in my brain for the next three days and, as much as I love Lady Gaga, I want it gone?Fischman: Yeah, totally hear you. So earworm control is such an interesting area. Actually, all the scientists I spoke with pointed out that in surveys, most people say they like their earworms; only about a third say theyre bothered by them.Feltman: Okay, so why do we tend to talk about them in such a negative light? I mean, you rarely hear someone say, Oh, Ive got this cool song in my head today, and thats so great.Fischman: Yeah, like, Im much more likely to say, I cant get this stupid song to stop. Psychologists say that thats probably a type of cognitive bias.Feltman: Mm.Fischman: Were more likely to pay attention to negative experiences, things that irritate us, so we react to the bad earworms and the good ones happily play in the background, giving us a bit of joy when we stop and notice them.Feltman: Yeah, I, I buy that. But if I do have a bad one, what can I do about it?Fischman: I went back to Nick Davidenko for that one. Nick has a interesting perspective on this because he always has an earworm.Davidenko: Yeah, its true. As far as I can remember, even as, as a kid, I rarely experience moment of where there is no music in my head, unless Im actively talking, for example.Its a little bit random: it can be popular music, less often classical music but jazz, kind of genre of music that I listen to or that I like or that I play is a candidateor even music I dont like or, you know, theme song from a TV show or a commercial.Feltman: Oh, wow. Im not quite at that level, but I do hear music in my head more often than not, and Ive honestly never stopped to think about how normal that is, and its usually benign or even enjoyable, but there are definitely times when it gets annoying. So what does Nick do to make it stop?Davidenko: At some point try to jump on to another song. So it could be a related song, harmonically or melodically, or it could be a completely different song, but it helps to be another song that can get stuck in my head.So it, its a trade-off, right? If youre finding yourself kind of tired of having a specific song, I have to trade it for another song, so I might as well trade it for something thats gonna be different enough and, and sort of strike a different part of my brain than whatever song that was.Fischman: And Kelly endorsed that idea.Jakubowski: Like, switch your mental radioso imagine a song that you really do like or listen to some other music. Its very, very hard to listen to music and have a song stuck in your head at the same time; those two things use very similar neural resources in our brain, so imagining music essentially uses very similar capacities to hearing music, so its pretty effective to block out an earworm.Fischman: Theres one final strategy sussed out by some scientists at the University of Reading in England: chew gum.Feltman: Really?Fischman: I had to get Kelly to explain that one to me. But apparently this works. It has to do with something called subvocalization.Essentially, when we think of lyrics or spoken words we subconsciously rehearse saying themnot to the point of moving our jaws but before thatkind of rehearsing the nerve signals that will move your jaws and your throat in the desired pattern. But chewing also involves those nerve signals, and they interfere with the word-rehearsal signals.Heres Kelly.Jakubowski: Chewing gum actually ties up what we call the sort of articulatory-motor planning system. So in order to mentally rehearse words or songs, we need to actually, essentially, sort of mentally sing them. So if youre using your mouth, you cant actually kind of fully mentally sing them.So what they found is that when people chewed gum vigorously, they had fewer earworms of a song that they had heard earlier in the experiment. I think the vigorously thing is key; I suppose if you kind of start chewing the gum to the beat of the music, that might not really help [laughs].Fischman: So, Rachel, I guess you cant play an earworm and chew gum at the same time.Feltman: [Laughs] Honestly, that sounds like a challenge to me, but Ill have to give it a try the next time I find myself stuck with an earworm that I, like, really cant shakesomething really annoying, you know? If only we had an example of something like that ...[CLIP: Listener Jesse sings Baby Shark.]Feltman: Thanks to listener Jesse from Florida for that lovely rendition of, of course, Baby Shark. And, Josh, thanks for coming by and planting all of these melodies in our heads.Fischman: Hey, Rachel, Im digging out the worms right along with you.Feltman: [Laughs] Thats all for today's episode. But before we sign off, here are a few more earworms from our lovely listeners.[CLIP: Listener Sarah vocalizes.][CLIP: Listeners Sarah and Andy sing the first verse and chorus of Scotty Doesnt Know by Lustra.][CLIP: Listener Andrea sings part of Holiday Road by Lindsey Buckingham.]Feltman: Thank you to Sarah from New Mexico, Andy and Sarah from Alaska, and Andrea from Kentucky for those submissions.Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy, and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Josh Fischman. Emily Makowski, Shayna Posses, and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!