
Incomplete music creates a need to resolve it. The incomplete nature of earworms has a role to play. Unidentified, incomplete, and unresolved music is like an unfinished thought that needs completion Research highlights a number of other cognitive processes, physiological processes, and environmental cues that facilitate an earworm. While this intuitively sums up the characteristics of an earworm, the story is far more complex.

Click To Tweet What are musical earworms?ĭefinition: Earworms (or Involuntary musical imagery) are involuntary, spontaneous, and repetitive perceptions of a particular musical sound in the absence of an external version of that sound. Being aware of it and the need to complete it keeps it going. Click To Tweet We get earworms because some catchy songs with unexpected changes manage to spontaneously reactive its memory in an incomplete way. Chew gum to extinguish a song stuck in your head! Chewing diverts and blocks resources from the brain that are responsible for pushing music into your mind's ear. And in other cases, completely changing the mood or context deletes the earworm.Ĭlick here for evidence-based ways to remove that song stuck in your head. In some cases, simply hearing the song or playing it till the end stops it.

Stopping the body and engaging the mouth helps too. In extreme cases, musical hallucinations manifest as OCD symptoms.Įngaging the mind’s auditory space with different sounds, conversations, or reading can stop the earworm. Sticky music occupies the phonological loop of memory with resources from the auditory cortex and sustains itself via ironic processes (trying to stop the earworm ironically reinforces its memory) & Zeigarnik effect (incomplete musical loop continues till it is resolved) to fill up the cognitive space available during mind-wandering.

Songs get stuck in the head because surprising, upbeat, and familiar musical structures stay incomplete in memory, mind-wandering brings recently-heard tunes into awareness, low cognitive engagement frees up mental space for music, personality traits like neuroticism emphasize existing thoughts and openness to experience welcome new thoughts, and bodily feedback from movement continues the song loop. Summary: Why does the stuck song syndrome occur?
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How to get rid of unwanted earworms and repetitive musical hallucinations?.How similar is imagined music and real music for the brain?.Does your current activity and cognitive space matter?.Does your personality, preferences, and behavior make you an earworm-hugger?.4 factors which make musical imagery subjective.Common strategies to extinguish an earworm.How do people react to involuntary musical imagery?.Who experiences involuntary musical imagery?.Unidentified, incomplete, and unresolved music is like an unfinished thought that needs completion.

The phenomenon of earworms: Why do songs get stuck in the head?.Summary: Why does the stuck song syndrome occur?.
