Why Can’t I Get This Song Out of My Head?

Melinda Wenner Moyer

I have had a Kacey Musgraves song stuck in my head for two weeks, and it’s making me crazy. Why is this happening? First, some reassurance: You’re not alone. Research suggests that catchy songs that get lodged in your head  colloquially known as earworms  are common and can happen to people weekly or even daily. “Some people wander around with music in their head kind of constantly,” said Ira Hyman, a psychologist who studies the phenomenon at Western Washington University in Washington state.

Scientists don’t fully understand why earworms are so hard to shake. But certain songs are more likely than others to set up shop in our heads. And the propensity to catch them can depend on what you’ve recently listened to and what you’re doing. Here’s what we know.

What causes an earworm? It probably comes as no surprise that the songs that insert themselves into our brains are typically songs we’ve recently listened to. But it’s also possible to get an earworm after hearing a word or sound  or even experiencing a situation  that reminds you of a particular song, said Callula Killingly, a postdoctoral research fellow who studies earworms at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

Perhaps someone mentions Madonna, and then you find yourself humming “Material Girl.” Or you take a bite of linguine that tastes exactly like the pasta you ate just before a Taylor Swift concert, and suddenly you’re singing “Shake It Off.” (While writing this piece, I couldn’t stop singing Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.”) But don’t expect to always understand where the earworm originated. Often, it’s “hard to know what got it started,” Hyman said.

Are certain songs more likely to stick than others? Research suggests that songs that have faster tempos — or longer, more sustained notes, like Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” — are more likely to get stuck in our heads. The more frequently we hear a song, the more likely we are to start singing it internally, too. So those ubiquitous Rick Astley memes that began in the late 2000s have likely caused millions of people to have “Never Gonna Give You Up” running on a loop in their heads.

Yet songs usually only tend to cause earworms when you’re doing certain kinds of activities, Hyman said. In one small study of 16 undergraduate students, for instance, researchers had them listen to a well-known song. The next day, the researchers asked them under what, if any, circumstances the song had popped back into their heads. The songs were most likely to arise as earworms when the participants were doing tasks that typically cause the mind to wander.

Such activities can include walking, showering or doing dishes, Hyman said. But more difficult tasks, like a hard puzzle or schoolwork, can also cause a wandering mind. The reason could be that we have more space in our brain to dedicate to earworms when we aren’t totally focused on the task at hand — as any high schooler attempting to do math homework could tell you.

It’s sometimes a little too easy to create the right condition for an earworm, Hyman said. His colleagues have approached him at the end of the day, immediately before his bike ride home, and have sung “Who Let the Dogs Out” just to get the song stuck in his head — and it has worked. “I’m like, ‘Stop that. I hate you,’” he said.

How can I get a song unstuck? Sometimes, earworms are perfectly pleasant. But other times, they can be extremely annoying (I’m looking at you, Rick Astley). Luckily, research suggests a few ways to rid yourself of them. Gum chewing is one potential option. In a study published in 2015, researchers had 18 undergraduates listen to a popular song and then asked them to try not to think about the song for three minutes. Half of the participants were given gum to “vigorously chew” during the three minutes, and half were not. The participants who chewed gum were less likely to report hearing the song in their heads.

Of course, this is just one small study, so more research is needed to understand how (or even if) gum chewing helps to eliminate existing earworms, said Emery Schubert, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Still, there’s an explanation that makes sense: Chewing gum may co-opt the brain regions involved with singing along to earworms in our heads, he explained.

Schubert said that because earworms tend to proliferate when our minds are unoccupied, it may also help to put yourself in a different state of mind — for instance, by entering a mildly stressful social situation. “Start talking to someone you don’t know very well,” Schubert said. “If I had an earworm now, and I spoke to you, I’d probably lose it.”

And if you have an earworm that’s particularly annoying, you can always try replacing it with a more enjoyable one, Hyman said. “Put a different song in there,” he said. “Choose one you don’t mind.”