Earworms 101

When I have a notion that some correlated event in my life is actually causal, I like to try to collect real data on the “notion” to see if it is true.  For example, I might have a sense that reading a book at night helps me to sleep better, or that every time I eat green peppers, I have heartburn at night.  But I wonder – are these vague notions actually true?  Does one cause the other?  Are they even actually correlated?  We all tend to get convinced of these kinds of connections based on just a few events that stick out in our minds.  We become so convinced of the correlation that we live our lives as if the notion were true without really pursuing any test of our assumption. I don’t like the idea of being misled in this way – even if it is something innocuous – so I try to design a way to test the notion and see if the data really supports it.  Over time, I’ll try to discuss a few of these attempts, but, in this entry, I’m going to start with an experience that is, I think, fairly universal:  earworms.

 

Earworms are those songs that play again and again in your head from time to time.  What causes them to happen?  There are a lot of notions about earworms, but I wondered if they were really true.  For example, I’ve heard people say a few times that the song you hear in your head is one that you heard but didn’t get to listen to all the way to the end. The notion is that your brain picks it up and tries to finish it.  Even Wikipedia thinks this notion is true.  But is that really true?

 

You probably don’t care about earworms, but I find them fascinating.  Why do they happen?  I find anything that your mind/brain does to be fascinating.  One interesting thing about earworms is that the song that plays in your mind is sometimes a song you don’t even like.  Often, after some time, you really want to get it out of your mind.  But it seems like you can’t.  It’s my mind, isn’t it?  Why can’t I just say “stop thinking about that song” and my mind just obeys and stops thinking about a particular song?  If our mind can’t control our mind, who does???

 

So…I started trying to track what songs became earworms and the conditions under which I heard the song (if at all) a little over three years ago.  During that time, I have identified 21 earworm songs that lasted long enough for me to remember to write them down.  Unfortunately, I have a bad memory so I know that during the past few years, I’ve forgotten to record earworm songs many times, creating some inaccuracies in my data collection.  I’ve tried to remedy that in the past couple of months – I’ll talk about that near the end of this entry.  But, for what it’s worth, here are my observations:

 

1.  Earworms can be intense while they are occurring, but once they leave my mind, I have a hard time recalling what the song was the next day.  That’s why I found tracking earworms to be difficult.  If I didn’t write it down the day it occurred, I would forget.  I would remember that I had an earworm…but I couldn’t remember what the song was.

 

2.  For me, earworms almost always occur in the morning and tend to only last through the morning.  After that, they are forgotten.  There were only two occurrences over the past 3+ years where the same song lasted two successive days in my head.  For what it’s worth, those songs were “Trying to Get That Feeling Again” by Barry Manilow and “Nobody Does It Better” by Carly Simon.

 

3.  Where do earworms come from?  For me, the most common situation is this:  I listen to music on the way home from work (I typically bounce around about six or seven different stations) and then, two or three days later, the song pops into my mind as an earworm!  I can never tell what song is going to become an earworm and, also, I would have listened to plenty of other songs in the two or three days since I heard it.  This particular characteristic fascinates me.  What is going on in our brains that a song you hear can bounce around unconsciously for days, and then somehow bubble to the surface one random morning?  That’s just crazy.

 

4.  I’ve tried the “partial song” idea.  Sometimes, when I’m coming home from work, I’ll hear a song I like and so I’ll turn it off halfway through (anything for science!).  I can never remember what song it was, but I do remember doing it.  All I know is that none of those songs have ever become earworms. 

 

5.  Earworms aren’t always songs that I heard being played somewhere.  One time I saw a Facebook post listing One-hit Wonders and it included the song “Black Betty” by Spiderbait.  That’s a song I haven’t heard in decades probably.  Yet, a day or so after I randomly read the title on a list, it bubbled up as an earworm.  It’s not a song I particularly like and, in fact, I’d say that earworm songs can be either songs you like or dislike – I don’t think that matters.

 

6.  I’ve rarely had an earworm that was a new song.  In fact, most of my earworms are songs I would have heard many times when I was growing up (like, I mean, 60’s or 70’s music) but haven’t heard much, if at all, since then.  The one exception to this rule (that I’ve noted in the past 3+ years) is the “Wellie Wisher’s Song”, which is a song from a kids show that my grandkids were watching.  That song became a very intense earworm for about a 24-hour period one time while I was on vacation.

 

7.  I wondered if it is possible to “create” an earworm by listening to a song over and over again.  So, I tried listening to a worship song with a simple chorus over and over again on my way to work (typically I hate listening to the same song over and over again – hate it).  The next day was a stressful day at work but then the following morning, that song was an earworm.  So, I do think it is possible to create earworms.

 

8.  I think ongoing stress reduces earworms.  I base this on the fact that earworms tend to go away for me once I get to work and face the various pressures of the day.  Also, during some stressful periods in my life, I’ve had an absence of earworms for one to two weeks at a time.  However, the relationship to stress might be indirect.  For example, when I’m stressed I might be less likely to listen to the radio on the way home, and therefore less opportunity for an earworm to pop up.

 

9.  One thing that seems odd to me is that earworm songs are very rarely a song on my playlist.  I sometimes listen to songs at work with headphones in order to drown out the background noises.  I’m a pretty boring guy, so my playlist has consisted of pretty much the same songs for years.  Yet, as far as I can recall, none of those songs have become earworms.  You’d think that the more common songs would have a higher chance of becoming earworms, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way.

 

10.  As I mentioned earlier, the one thing I couldn’t measure was how often I have earworms.  So, about two months ago I started trying to track earworms every morning.  Here is the data so far:  4 earworm mornings out of 64 total days tracked, or about 6%.  I would say that the last month has been more stressful than usual, and also I think I haven’t been listening to songs as much on my drive home.  Anyway, I’ll keep tracking this over time and see what happens.  I’ll have to give an update down the road.

 

If you feel so inclined, I think you would find it interesting to do your own tracking.  If you do, let me know the results and I’ll pool things together.  I suppose it would also be interesting to see if there are common songs that tend to be earworms…like “Baby Shark”, haha. 

 

One word of warning though.  Just the act of tracking your own earworms has some effect on their occurrence I believe.  For example, in the morning when I fill out my spreadsheet regarding earworms, just the act of thinking “did I have an earworm this morning?” can sometimes trigger an earworm.  In fact, I bet my mention of the song “Baby Shark” in the previous paragraph has triggered an earworm (unless you are one of the fortunate people in the world who has never heard that song).  I apologize for that!

 

If I think about this from a brain physiology perspective, I find the concept of earworms to be quite difficult to explain, and possibly quite useful in understanding some difficult concepts such as consciousness.  An earworm is absolutely a conscious event – that’s what makes it so annoying at times – it seems to be some unconscious meandering of our brain that somehow bubbles to the surface to become conscious.  But how in the world does that happen?  I am conscious of hearing a song on the radio, which then somehow begins bouncing around in my brain totally unconsciously…for days (!), before somehow becoming conscious again and again for a few hours, and then disappears from consciousness, never to be heard from again.  How in the world does that happen??? 

             I know that one thing neuroscientists search for are “neural correlates of consciousness”, which involves figuring out the minimum brain structure that is necessary for consciousness (e.g. humans can lose one whole half of their brain, and yet still be conscious).  But the existence of earworms seems to complicate that concept.  Presumably, songs are stored in memory in the brain in some manner by strengthening the connections between some whole set of neurons.  I don’t think anyone knows the details here, but let’s imagine that there is some way to trigger this series of neurons to “play back” the song in your mind.  By hearing the song once, it makes the “triggering” event to be more sensitive and easier to initiate.  Yet, for some reason it is not triggered for days?  I would suggest that it must get triggered over that period, but it just “plays” the song in the background – in our unconscious mind.  Then, somehow, one day, that same path yields a conscious result and, for whatever reason, now that hair trigger keeps getting tripped repeatedly for a while.  Or maybe it fires spontaneously for a while?

             My point here is that it is the same set of neurons in both the unconscious and conscious case.  The same set of neurons encode the earworm.  So what makes them unconscious for some period and then conscious for another period?  This would mean that the seat of consciousness, or at least some aspect of it, changes over time.  To me, this highly complicates the idea of finding a neural correlate for consciousness because it would seem to indicate that consciousness can “take up residence” in different areas of the brain at different times.  I find this fascinating.

             I suppose it is also possible that the pattern of neuronal firing gets copied from some kind of deep memory into some kind of “conscious memory”, which then gets played over and over.  There is, certainly, a “working memory” or “short-term memory” in the brain.  But one would still have to wonder how it is that such a transfer of a whole set of neuronal firings can get transferred and why does it take days for that to happen?  It’s not like we hear the earworm song again and again between the time that we hear it and the time that it becomes an earworm.  On the contrary, we never hear it again until it pops, often unwanted, into our conscious minds. 

             The existence of earworms does seem to clearly indicate one fun thing about our brains:  our brains must contain some kind of “playlist” of a huge group of songs that we have heard throughout our lifetimes.  I know that some of my earworms occurred with songs that I had not heard for twenty or thirty years.  Yet, somehow, that song has been stored in my brain for all that time – just waiting to be released.  That seems really crazy!!!