You Asked: Why Do Certain Songs Get Stuck in Your Head?

You can’t walk into the office without Rihanna’s voice singing “work work work work work work” in your head. And that one line from Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” still makes you want to scream. These are commonly known as earworm songs—those sticky tunes that continue to play in your head long after you wish you could skip to the next track. Experts call them “involuntary musical imagery.” And more than 90% of adults report hearing them on a weekly (if not daily) basis, finds a recent study in the journal Psychology of Music. While there’s a huge amount of person-to-person variation when it comes to these songs, they hang around for an average of 30 minutes, and they tend to be tunes with lyrics, not just instrumentation. Fortunately, most people report earworm songs as benign or pleasant. But others find them annoying or even maddening. “Some people are plagued by them to the point that it interferes with life,” says Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, a professor and director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas who has studied the ways people get songs stuck in their heads. Margulis says earworm songs tend to have some predictable characteristics. For one thing, they tend to be small snippets of a song—not the whole track. “It’s usually just a bit of the melody,” she says. The songs you’ve heard recently are also the most likely to get lodged in your crani...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized earworm earworm definition earworm meaning earworm music earworm song earworm songs healthytime Research song stuck in head song stuck in my head what is an earworm why do songs get stuck in your head Source Type: news