Chewing on earworms

There are various ways to mentally torture your friends. You can make the comment that you like their new haircut when you know full well that they haven’t had one. You can invite them over for a “film and food” night and then serve only sesame seeds while showing “The English Patient”. Or you can subtly sing a few lines of catchy tune, perhaps The Wiggles’ “Hot Potato” or maybe the Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out”, knowing full well that your friend will be helplessly running that tune through their head for the next few hours, if not the rest of the day. That is because songs like that are “earworms” but if you do fall foul of an earworm a new study has discovered a remedy for you.

Earworms are not a modern phenomenon tied to the pop music sausage factory. In 1845 Edgar Allan Poe describes how it is “quite a common thing” to be “annoyed” or “tormented” by “the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song”. In the mid 1870s Mark Twain wrote a short story based around earworms. Essentially, an “earworm” is a tune that becomes “stuck” in the head. Previous research into the phenomenon of earworms revealed that “sticky” songs are those that are relatively simple, repetitive, and contain an element that surprises the listener. This incongruous element can be an interrupted pattern or something that violates expectations of what comes next. Episodes of earworms have also been shown to tend to strike people with neurotic tendencies more often. These people are not seriously neurotic, but may simply be more prone to worrying and anxiety, and may have neurotic habits like biting pencils or tapping fingernails.

In terms of how to protect yourself from earworms, there are lots of recommendations out there. it is recommended for instance, that you not worry about a stuck song as soon as it appears, and perhaps avoid listening to music for a spell if it becomes too sticky. Other strategies to unstick a stuck tune involve trying to listen to something else, distracting yourself with another activity, and trying to erase the repetition of one song snippet by singing the song all the way through. Now a new study has found a more reliable way to get rid of an earworm; chew some gum.

The basis of the new research is that the part of the brain that processes auditory information, the auditory cortex, is triggered when you hear a familiar tune and your mind fills in the rest creating an earworm. However, research has shown that auditory memories can be eradicated by other vocalisations or even sub-vocalisations (meaning going over words in your head without saying them). This has been said to be a case of the “inner ear” being overridden by the “inner voice”. However, these researchers wondered whether, since some earworms are not vocal in nature but just melodies, perhaps the sub-vocalisation does not even need to involve words, but just movement of the jaw may be enough to eradicate auditory memories, which is where chewing gum comes into the equation.

In the new study there were three experiments. In the first experiment subjects were played the first 30 seconds (the chorus) of the song “Play Hard” by David Guetta featuring Flo Rida and Akon twice to ensure they were familiar with the tune. They were then exposed to either the gum or no-gum condition. For the no-gum condition they were asked to try not to think of the music they had just heard for three minutes. They were told that they could sit and think about whatever they wished for the next three minutes provided they did not think of the tune they had just heard. They were asked, every time they found themselves thinking of the music, to indicate this by pressing the “q” key on a computer keyboard in front of them. Following this suppression period, participants were next asked to think freely for a further three minutes about anything they wished, which might include the music they had just heard. Once again, however, they were asked to press the “q” key whenever the tune came to mind. The gum condition was identical to the no-gum condition except that participants were supplied with the chewing gum at the start of the condition and were asked to chew it “vigorously”. All participants were exposed to both gum and no-gum conditions, the order of which was counterbalanced across participants.

The results indicate that gum chewing reduced the number of times the music was consciously experienced and reported in both music-suppression conditions and where participants were free to think about the music. This suggests that gum chewing interferes with the formation of the auditory imagery needed to experience an involuntary musical recollection, or earworm.

The second experiment was identical except that participants were asked to press the “q” key whenever the song came to mind simply as a thought and to press the “p” key whenever they experienced the music playing in their heads. The results this time showed that gum-chewing repressed more of hearing the song rather than simply thinking about the song.

The third experiment was again identical except that the song was “Payphone” by Maroon 5 and this was played in full for two minutes prior to each experimental condition, the “w” key was used for collecting responses, and in addition to the gum and no-gum groups there was also a “tapping” group. Subjects in that tapping group were asked to tap continuously upon the desk with each of the fingers of their dominant hand in turn. The tapping group was introduced to see whether any motor action may eliminate an earworm.

The results showed that general motor activity (tapping) is less effective than motor activity that is specifically subvocal as a way to eradicate earworms.

So you need no longer be a hapless victim to an earworm, you can chew that earworm out of existence. That leaves us just one thing to leave with you; “Hot potato, hot potato…”