The loop

Somewhere around the second shower of the morning, a song you have not heard in a year starts playing. It is not in the room. You did not choose it. It plays the same eight seconds again, and when it ends it starts over.

Nearly everyone has this, and researchers call it involuntary musical imagery. In 2014 Victoria Williamson and colleagues in the UK and Finland sorted 1,046 written reports of how people react to it. Most episodes were not a problem: many were neutral or pleasant, and passive acceptance and enjoyment were among the commonest responses. A minority were unwanted enough that people went looking for a way out. The behaviours they reported as most popular and most effective were a little funny. Find the tune and play it through, or distract yourself with other music or with words.

The assumption most of us carry is that only bad songs get stuck. Ira Hyman's group at Western Washington University tested that with a survey, a diary study and three lab experiments. In their data, songs people knew and liked became intrusive often. The songs followed cues in the environment. And if a song kept playing in someone's head right after they listened to it, it was likely to come back as an intrusive song within the next 24 hours. The same paper found that these episodes arrived during low-effort activities, and that loading people up with demanding tasks increased how often intrusive songs showed up. In other words, the loop is not only a product of a quiet mind, and the authors say they could create and manipulate it easily in the lab.

Then there is chewing gum. In 2015 Philip Beaman and two co-authors at the University of Reading ran three experiments on the idea that an earworm is partly a motor event, with the speech and singing machinery rehearsing the tune below the level of sound. In their first experiment, chewing gum, which occupies exactly that machinery, reduced the number of both voluntary and unwanted musical thoughts. The second showed it changed the experience of hearing the music, not only of thinking about a tune in the abstract. The third checked that this was not just a general distraction effect. A simple thought-suppression story would predict that a second task makes the loop harder to fight. The data went the other way.

That is a lab result about one chewing task, not a cure, and the authors' claim is narrower: the data support a link between articulatory motor planning and the appearance of music in consciousness. One working explanation is that a song stuck in your head is a short phrase your mouth is quietly practising. It would also explain why the folk remedies sort into two kinds. Singing the tune to the end or looking it up closes the phrase. Chewing, talking, or putting on different music gives the machinery something else to do.

If you want to test it, you are the experiment. Next time the eight seconds start over, stop fighting and play the song all the way to the last note. If it still will not let go, chew something. Report back if you find out which one worked for you.