Dr's Casebook: ​After the Oscars those annoying earworms

Dr Keith Souter writes: Catching an earworm is also described as ‘stuck song syndrome.’ Earworms are very common, and most people get them from time to time, but they quickly disappear. They are snatches of music or song that you just can’t get out of your head. The thing about these earworms is that they are not the whole song or piece of music but tend to be just a few snatches. They can be quite annoying as it is as if your mind gets into an irritating playback loop.

One study found that people who often experience earworms are liable to complain of sleep disturbance or insomnia six times more often than people who do not get earworms.

Earworms tend to grab you when your mind is not fully occupied. Their catchiness makes them easy to remember, hence they intrude into the brain’s active memory. To get rid of them it has been suggested that one can use the Goldilocks’ effect and challenge your brain. That is, like Goldilocks you need to try a mental challenge that is not too easy, not too hard, but just the right amount.

Doing some activity that is automatic, like walking or driving is too easy because it is insufficient of a mental challenge to the memory, so the internal record-player has plenty of opportunity to replay the earworm. Doing a hard Sudoku or crossword engages it too much and the earworm will annoyingly intrude. Solving simple anagrams, of say five or six letters seems to be just right and works best.

Since an earworm is just a snatch of a song or piece of music it may also help to play and listen to the whole song. This often breaks the loop because the whole song replaces the fragment and is too long to get stuck.

Or you can try a cure song or cure music to antidote it. Singing a national anthem, or the Happy Birthday song all the way through seems to work well.