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Scientists Study Getting an Unwanted Tune Out of Your Head
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Richard Gray reports that scientists have found a way to help anyone plagued by those annoying tunes that lodge themselves inside our heads and repeat on an endless loop — when snippets of a catchy song inexplicably play like a broken record in your brain. The solution can be to solve some tricky anagrams to force the intrusive music out of your working memory allowing the music to be replaced with other more amenable thoughts. 'The key is to find something that will give the right level of challenge,' says Dr Ira Hyman, a music psychologist at Western Washington University who conducted the research. 'If you are cognitively engaged, it limits the ability of intrusive songs to enter your head.' Hyman says that the problem, called involuntary memory retrieval, is that something we can do automatically like driving or walking means you are not using all of your cognitive resource, so there is plenty of space left for that internal jukebox to start playing. Dr Vicky Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, says that the most likely songs to get stuck are those that are easy to hum along to or sing and found that that Lady Gaga was the most common artist to get stuck in people's heads, with four of her catchy pop songs being the most likely to become earworms – Alejandro, Bad Romance, Just Dance and Paparazzi. Other surveys have reported Abba songs such as Waterloo, Changes by David Bowie or the Beatles' Hey Jude."
great ... now i got Hey Jude stuck in my head
"It's Friday, Friday..."
Sorry about that.
I'm at work right now. I should be programming. Instead, I'm being distracted with Springtime for Hitler (from The Producers) driving me crazy all morning. Get it out!
(Ok, yes, also I'm writing tests, which are boring, so his hypothesis probably *is* right: I could drive that song out if I were working on something that actually engaged my brain and made me want to devote all my brainpower to it.)
You just have to sing a song to yourself that is equally "catchy" but worn out... at least worn out for you.
My wife and I use "Popeye the Sailor Man" but my brother and his wife (musicians) use "Baby Elephant Walk" since they can vamp that ad eternam.
Can't get it out of my head...
Though I don't listen to pop music, I've found it often to be quite invasive. But I have easily gotten it out of my head by actually singing it, might be some sort of internal thought process that needs to be executed. But again, just some guy's anecdote.
Now I have the worst mashup ever stuck in head!
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
After reading those song titles of Lady Gaga's, I started humming them, and now I can't get them out! Reading an article about removing earworms leads to earworm. Epic fail! Guess I should go do some anagrams.
Better watch out for Summertime Song. That dude is dangerous
I would have thought being injured and fearing for your life would be enough to drive a song out of your mind, but apparently not! Though I wonder if shock might bring on this sort of "looping" in your mind, focusing on something else as a form of escapism.
I'm trying to drive out an annoying TV theme song right now by listening to Pandora until I find a song I'd rather have stuck in my head.
867-5309
Dumb ways to die. It's been stuck in my head for about a week now...
Worst fried brain tune ever.
I just start thinking about a classic cover song for a minute or two. Catchy enough to get rid of whatever was stuck in my head, annoying enough to be forgotten moments later.
Hum "Girl from Ipanema". That song will get ANY other song out of your head, and "Girl from Ipanema" won't stay in your head either.
"Rain drops keep falling on my head"... I play that and the earworm is gone.
I just listen to the song stuck in my head through speakers or whatever, and it goes away. Where's my grant money?
You're welcome.
Obligatory xkcd
There was a similar study long ago not dealing with how to get the song out alone, but also what the cause of the song being stuck was. The majority of cases tended to be related to the brain not being able to remember or work out a part of the song. That study also gave the easiest remedy to the issue: Listen to the song from start to finish without interruption. In a majority of their test cases, the playing of the song jogged the memory and filled in the gaps allowing the brain to move on to other things.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
there, feel better?
The only song there I even recognize is Hey Jude, and it doesn't ever get stuck in my head.
I don't think any of those have the same power as TV show themes do. I can get anything from the Facts of Life to Thundercats to the Knight Rider theme stuck easier than anything else, as well as several Phineas and Ferb songs.
I'm not sure that even those can compete with the dark power unleashed by Friday's announcement of the remastered Duck Tales game. Odds are good that was an evil plot to study the effects of getting the same song stuck in millions of peoples heads at the same time.
Humming Imperial march has always worked for me.
It means that if a kid at school, or a white collar worker claims to have a song stuck in their head; it means that they are slacking off at school/work.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I hope you get William Shatner's "Rocket Man" stuck in your head for weeks.
...is to think of one that's even worse.
Works every time, until you hit the bottom.
For me it's either an airhead singing about the end of a work week, or a giant imaginary purple dinosaur singing about how he can't stick to a single lover.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my chevy to the levee
But the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die
That could be the way to fixing up people who keep being fixated on issues, regarless whether it's a tune or some form of OCD..
My approach is to play music softly in the background. At work we have private offices, as opposed to being a cube farm, and what it takes for me is to have the music just loud enough to keep something else from looping constantly, and it's not loud enough to bother my coworkers. The experience is that the annoying tune[s] have no way to start playing, so they don't loop.
For me, a song playing in my head is very distracting, to the point I can't get other work done. Seems like every time I get in the shower some song will start playing and it takes until I'm out and the hair dryer is going that it disappears. Wait, this means I have a disability, woo hoo!!! If it isn't tinitis, it's music in my head. Where's that number for the disability office?
This should do the trick.
This song has been in my head off and on since this Christmas. Merry Christmas to all you others who now have it in your head!
Why don't we just get rid of Lady Gaga?
...the urge to sing The Lion Sleeps Tonight is just a whim away...
Some of the easiest songs to get stuck in your head (as used by the researchers)
Alejandro – Lady Gaga
Bad Romance – Lady Gaga
Call me Baby – Carly Rae Jepsen.
Single Ladies – Beyoncé
She Loves You – The Beatles
I Wanna Hold Your Hand – The Beatles
She Loves You – The Beatles
SOS – Rihanna
You Belong with Me – Taylor Swift
Apparently She Loves You is such a catchy song that it gets stuck in your head twice.
Music psychologist?
Really?
How does he get funded?
[Thanks a lot, Nurse Ratched.]
Have gnu, will travel.
A gut goes to the doctor and says he has " She's a Lady " playing over and over and over in his head. The doctor says, you may be suffering from Tom Jones disease. The guy asks, is that common? The doctor reply's, well, It's Not Unusual .......
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Gaaaa! You bastard! I didn't see that coming and you got me!
Talk about the cure being worse than the disease...
Try to remember these themes in order, they do not have lyrics so there is no guide other than what you hear in your head.
The Entertainer
Smoke On The Water ( As a guitar teacher this is my nightmare riff )
Also sprach Zarathustra
Apache
Theme from Route 66
So you see sometimes thinking about multiple themes can clear all the other crap out especially when you get to obscure themes that you try to remember from a long time ago. Lyrics can confuse but instrumental music can clear your mind as it reaches memory spaces that are different from vocal memory.
It might be interesting to observe which memory pathways are used for purely musical memory and if they are different from those triggered by a song lyric.
I have a better theory as to why songs get stuck in your head. If the song ends before it resolves (or if it never resolves) it will get stuck in your head. Think about when songs get stuck in your head - it is almost always when you did not hear the end (i.e., the resolution) of the song. A song you hate comes on the radio, so you quickly change the channel. You hear a snippet in an elevator. You find yourself humming the song you hear over the PA system in a store because you left before it was finished.
Someone else posted a response earlier that "It's a Small World" was a likely candidate. That song ends on a major fifth note, meaning it does not resolve (it should end on a first to resolve). In other words, if played in the key of C, it ends on a G. If it ended on a C, it would resolve. Another song that does not resolve is the theme song to Billy Hatcher. Either way - if the song does not resolve, it will get stuck in your head.
Another person posted that singing the song to completion would drive it out. This also confirms my assertion.
I suggested this to my daughter as a science fair project, and we tested it. We made two versions of the same song, each two minutes long. In the earworm version, it repeated after a couple of phrases of the song were played, but before it resolved. In the second, it played all the phrases in the song, including the resolution. We had people listen to one of these songs while they sorted an Uno deck, then asked them about 20 questions. Most of the questions were designed to throw them off and not know what the experiment was about, but the last two were "Do you have a song stuck in your head?" and "If so, what song?" It took a couple of minutes to get to those questions, and we felt that would be long enough to know if the song were stuck or not. The person asking the questions did not know which song they had listened to, so we were at least attempting to make the tests double blind.
The results were stark - five of the eight people who listened to the earworm version got the song stuck in their head. None of the other eight did. Sixteen is not a large sample set, but that was how many people we could round up to torture before her project was due.
That'll fix you.
Well, you did ask...
Midnight on the water,
I saw the ocean's daughter
walking on a wave's chicane
Staring as she called my name, and...
yes, it's a song about earworms.
Now, if the GP were trolling he'd find a far more annoying song than hey Jude.
This is how: "play" the tune on purpose, each note as well as you can, of what's playing. Then stop.
It will no longer play automatically.
You got there in the first place by creating an automaticity which causes it to then play by "itself". To blow automaticities do it yourself fully aware, willingly of course, with the full intention to do what the automaticity does. It will blow.
At least works great for me.
the most insidious (on purpose) form of this HAS to be tv and radio jingles. I have had the meowmix song stuck in my head i don't even have cats! Those things are designed to get stuck in your head so you are still listening to the damned commercials even when the tv is off. Also two i sometime start humming at work are Dr Demento's fish heads and that circus theme song you hear every time a circus is depicted on tv what is the name of that thing anyway.
I know everybody gets a tune stuck in their head from time to time. Try having music running through your head *all* the time. Constantly. When you're working, reading, walking, thinking, eating, trying to sleep ... ALL. THE. TIME.
I always thought this was normal until I found out I had aspergers (which also explained a lot of other oddities with me)
Needless to say, thread just about made my brain explode.
What's bad is when the song makes you hungry for a tunafish sandwich.
A different song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeOEoMOZXI0
I was plagued by bad songs stuck in my head until I took up meditation many years ago. Learning to focus clears your mind. No anagrams needed. Watching your breathing is enough.
One of my (so far unused) fake headlines:
"Music 'Stuck in Head' is Theft, According to RIAA Chief"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
gangnam style
Ok so once I heard a way to stop the song going in your head is to end the song in your head with a big huge finale ending (complete with fireworks and encore if you want to go big). Then right after that start a different tune in your mind of any other song you know. This has worked pretty well for me
Namaste
Is to play them on the piano. Once played my brain can move on to other things. It's like nudge nudge, it goes like this.... try it out... nudge nudge... it goes like this .. try it out...... and so on, until it is satisfied.
The old "Hockey Night in Canada" theme, once unofficially considered Canada's second national anthem.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
replacing noise with noise is not really a solution. It's more difficult but better to learn to create silence inside ourselves.
Really? It was always Mama Mia or the Inspector Gadget theme song for me..
Could the research be the beginning of learning how to make tunes stick in people's heads? In a Sci-Fi book (The Demolished Man ?), the protagonist wants to keep mind-readers from seeing his thoughts. To do this he listens to a commercial jingle, which have becomes so effective at sticking in people's minds that they're illegal. The mind-readers can't get anything out of him.
I find that songs that are stuck in my head are ones that have a repetitive section, but I don't know the end of the song. To get a song unstuck, I sing a song that I know from start to finish (out loud if possible, in my head if not) and then distract myself.
For me the most successful song for this purpose is the Muppet Show Theme.
Can they do something about the high pitched ringing tone inside my head?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song
I'm a climber and during the long boring approaches in very early morning, when your brain is half asleep on semi-auto, I always have the latest tune I heard in the car playing back and forth. Fortunately as soon as the climbing starts, it's nowhere to be heard again, confirming what they say in TFA about the brain 'not being engaged enough'. So my trick is to play a good song just before parking the car, otherwise it can really drive you to jump off a cliff if it's Chris Brown.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
"... so there is plenty of space left for that infernal jukebox to start playing."
Works for me anyway.
Has anyone ever had a song that kept playing in their heads slowly over time change into something else. I'd have a song that would change pitch, or lose or gain notes, and the lyrics would get jumbled. That would happen if I listened to a song once or twice, and didn't hear it again for a few days, and then its like a different song. Is it just me?
I'm sailing away..
Setanopencourseforthe virginsea...
So many posts, and nobody has asked the really crucial question. I mean, who cares about songs. The really important question is:
Does it also work with the goatse guy?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I heard the trick is to play the "happy birthday" song in your head. Like some comment said, when the brain plays the song from start to finish, it moves on. The Happy Birthday song will very rapidly replace the song stuck in your head and when it comes to the finish, the brain will naturally move on from songs.
You'd have to make a voluntary effort to go back to the song you wanted to remove from your head.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Nyan Cat one hour non stop can wipe any sticky song from your mind.
La vaca Moo!
Due to the distribution of Disney theme parks around the globe, there's always at least one park open somewhere. So it is constantly being played 24/7/365. I believe it holds the world record for the song with the most number of "performances". -N.
Obviously not enough Slashdotters have had children
The prerequisite to that would be that slashdotters get a date. Not likely to happen on a large scale.
Seek professional help, dude. Really, no joke here. Your constant posting by itself is a danger sign. Turn off your electronics for a while.
Is the theme to Inspector Gadget. You will never get rid of it, but at least it replaces whatever Kesha song is stuck in your head at the time.
Alejandro chorus: IV-I-V-vi
Poker Face vi-IV-I-V
others are similar or the same (one uses a closely related minor instead, as I recall) - the cycle is identical, it just starts on a different chord.
I remember hearing somewhere that 36% of pop music used that progression (or maybe it was #1 songs for a specific year). Axis of Awesome makes fun of it. Rob Paravonian nailed it in his Pachelbel rant (as a fellow cellist that plays guitar that had gone on a similar rant, beautifully done).
Because 'Concentrate on doing something' isn't a new answer. Which I wouldn't have paid a penny for.
...full of hollowpoints?
You've got to be kidding, I knew this about thirty years ago. Listen to some other songs, preferably ones you like. Mix them up a bit so it doesn't happen again with a new song. Repeat the treatment whenever the symptoms reoccur until the problem goes away. How much money was spent on this research?
You're still reading this! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sCrhRPCMg
One that it's equally sticky but I don't mind listening to it inside my head.
In my case, it's the "Super Mario" theme.
In that case, the antitode was obvious. Put down the Lego box and get the hell out of F.A.O. Schwarz.
We're no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full committiment's what I'm thinking of
You just wouldn't get this from any other guy
I just want to tell you how I'm feeling
Gotta make you understand
Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around, and desert you
Never gonna make you cry,
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie, and hurt you
I read somewhere that basically if you're male and you're having trouble peeing in company, doing some maths (in your head, not out loud) will otherwise occupy the part of your brain that deals with inhibition, and the flow will commence. Sounds similar to me, anyway.
Just sing Red Red Wine by UB40, that will get stuck in your head and push the other song.
With a song stuck in my head, I have found http://unhearit.com/ to be surprisingly effective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakety_Sax
(yakety yak - don't talk back!)
I hum or whistle something complicated requiring full attention (the one I usually use is a Bach piece), in other words, something a little too complicated for getting stuck in my head. This usually unsticks whatever was going around in my head without replacing it.
udin
4 chords. Take a close look at all the songs, and then look at the notes of their chorus. Just sayin'
MMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-BOP......
I'm sorry.
It actually helps through. I spent so long hating that song in the 90s I became immune to it. Now I just think it for about 10 seconds, it cancels anything else in my brain and then just leaves. Works on more than just music too.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
Number 9, number 9, number 9 ... beep, twitter ... number 9 ... number 9, number 9
Thanks
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
This Hale & Pace song might be a good test subject for further studies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFuGRBAKM2I
Of course, there's no correlation between this and violence and video games.
Why would I want to forget the tunes in my head ? They make the day more pleasant afterall.
Always works for me, half-tempo big broadway endings preferred.
One trick that works reasonably well for me when I want to get rid of a song stuck in my head is to stop on a random note of the song and just hold it in my mind, stretch it out as long as I need to, while lowering the sound, like the band / orchestra is finishing the song on a long fermata.
Sometimes if I still feel the song is going to start looping in my head again, I add pompous embellishments, and a string of perfect cadences to really bring the song to an end. The more ridiculous it sounds, the better it works. It doesn't matter if it's not the real end of the song, it helps my brain move on to other things because it feels like the song is really done.
You know the rules and so do I.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Having a song stuck in my head is how I learn it, improve it, or deconstruct it. If I hear a song that I do not like, and sense that it is going to try to eat my brain, I I just counteract it with something from my own brain. Memewar.
"If you like pina coladas & getting caught in the rain....... currently stuck in my head! You're welcome :) :)
Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden works every time. Clears out the song, doesn't stick around.
Tension, apprehension, and dissention have begun. Tension, apprehension, and dissention have begun. Works against telepaths, too!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-N1yJyrQRY ...You're welcome again.
Tell me they aren't speaking English there though if you listen to it long enough, "Ah, Get lost in the day ya know..."
.
Alternatively, give me a button to push to shut the "music" off.
I come here for the love