Ear worms: why do some songs get stuck in our heads?

Psychological research into this (sometimes annoying!) experience suggests that ear worms may actually have an important role in the consolidation of memories.

If you have ever found that you literally can’t get a song or tune out of your head, you may have experienced the phenomenon known as an ‘earworm’. Generally experienced with popular or catchy songs, earworms play on a loop continually through our minds, often for a period of minutes, hours, or even for a full day!

Research suggests that there is variation in which songs are more likely to become earworms – with pop songs with faster tempos that have been released recently in the charts or have been in the charts for longer are more likely to be reported as earworms (Miley Cyrus - Flowers is currently the most popular song of 2023 according to downloads – a likely earworm for some maybe!).

Furthermore, there are individual differences in how likely individuals are to experience earworms, with those who are more interested and engaged in music seemingly most likely to be familiar with the experience.

One of the roles of earworms is believed to be closely linked to memory storage. During our day-to-day lives, we encounter huge amounts of information, some of which is important to be stored and some of which is discarded. When we are asleep, events that have happened during the day are consolidated, meaning that our memories are replayed by our neurons to strengthen them for the long term. It is believed that earworms have a role to play in supporting this process.

Our memory for events that we experience in life is known as episodic memory which the hippocampus has a key role in. However, our memory for songs is believed to be processed by our procedural memory system – the same memory system that remembers how to perform motor skills or actions, such as riding a bike. To investigate how these two memory systems may interact together, Kubit and Janata (2022) exposed participants to 8-second loops of music whilst they completed a task (these loops of music were designed to bring about the experience of an ‘earworm’). One week later, participants were shown clips of unfamiliar films whilst the earworm song they had been exposed to initially was playing. Participants were then asked, over a period of 1-4 weeks to recall details of the film clip using the earworm song as a cue for retrieval. Participants who reported that they had experienced more of the earworm over the course of the study, had greater accuracy of recall for the film clips, suggesting that the earworms played an important role in the consolidation of the memory. This study carries particular importance when considering its practical applications to Alzheimer’s disease where the region of the brain primarily affected is linked to episodic, but not procedural memories. It may be that earworms could facilitate the activation of episodic memories in these patients.

Suggested Activities

You may wish to listen to the original episode of PsychCrunch (the podcast for the British Psychological Society) from which inspiration for this blog came, or even read a summary of the original article.

In addition, you may find it useful to consider the following questions:

• How does this study add to what you have learned already about how our long-term memory functions?
• How could we use this research in the real world? For example, for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease?

Listen: https://www.bps.org.uk/researc...

Read: Kubit, B. M., & Janata, P. (2022). Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for incidentally associated event knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(1), p1–24 https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLan...