PsychCrunch · The British Psychological Society Research Digest

Why songs get stuck in our heads

·25 min·1 clip

Michael Scullin recommends five minutes of writing before bed to reduce earworms and help people fall asleep 37% faster.

1. PsychCrunch examines the psychology of songs that repeat involuntarily as earworms. 2. Ginny Smith hosts interviews with Kelly Jakubowski, Peter Janata, and Michael Scullin about earworms, memory, and sleep. 3. The episode asks why familiar music returns spontaneously and whether earworms serve useful or harmful functions. 4. Kelly Jakubowski defines an earworm as music that comes to mind spontaneously and repeats for minutes, hours, or a day. 5. Jakubowski says familiar, well-liked music is the most common trigger for spontaneous repetition. 6. She gives the word “umbrella” as a memory association that can cue Rihanna’s song of the same title. 7. Jakubowski reports that upbeat, faster songs and generic melodies were more likely to become earworms in her research. 8. Her research also found that generic melodic contours with unusual interval structures were more likely to become earworms. 9. Songs recently in the charts or present in the charts for longer were more likely to become earworms. 10. Brain-imaging research discussed by Jakubowski finds similar regions activated when people listen to music and imagine it. 11. Jakubowski says everyday reports portray earworms as negative, while consistent everyday-life studies find mostly positive or neutral experiences. 12. Janata links repeated musical replay with memory consolidation and distinguishes musical memory from autobiographical event memory. 13. Janata explains that music is associated with procedural memory, while autobiographical events involve the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus. 14. His team used eight-second garage-band loops and found that a task occupying procedural memory reduced the chance of an earworm. 15. Participants who developed earworms from the loops later recalled more details from two-minute Disney cartoons. 16. Janata suggests that a vacation theme song could repeatedly cue and strengthen memories connected with that vacation. 17. Michael Scullin reports that people with nighttime earworms were three times as likely to be poor-quality sleepers in a 200-person survey. 18. In a sleep-laboratory experiment, lyrical Taylor Swift music produced fewer earworms than the identical instrumental music, while induced earworms increased awakenings and lighter sleep. 19. Psychology students interested in music, memory, and sleep research. 20. Listeners uninterested in repetitive music or cognitive science may skip it.

As heard by us

A familiar mental loop becomes a tidy route into how earworms may support memory.

Songs that loop in the mind become more than a familiar irritation here: they open a quiet route into memory. PsychCrunch follows the earworm from spontaneous repetition to Kelly Jakubowski's work on unfamiliar eight-second musical loops, showing how a small mental snag can…

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If your brain has ever hired a chorus for an unpaid residency, you will recognize the problem.

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