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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
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.)
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.
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 have this in its most extreme form :(
I am quite serious when I say that if I hum another tune to clear my head - the other tune becomes the new earworm stuck in my head. Almost any music I hear can result in another snippet stuck in my head. I spend probably 60% of my waking hours with some annoying thing stuck in my head. Worse yet I tap them out with my fingers or hum them outloud. It can often be nothing more than the same 2-4 bars of a song without the lyrics - off and on for say 10 hours. Every time I think its gone it will show up again a few hours later.
I do not generally listen to music at all these days, but I may have to take up Sudoku or something, sigh :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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.
I hope you get William Shatner's "Rocket Man" stuck in your head for weeks.
This should do the trick.
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.
The reason why the suggested solution doesn't work for anyone on slashdot is that it sequires you to think, even a little bit. and, of course, this IS slashdot.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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 *
Oops - didn't mean to post that anonymously. That's my post. Really.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
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
I've spent a lot of time on hold waiting for tech support over the years. The absolute worst was a vendor who had a CD with the theme songs for nine different sitcoms. Spent over an hour and a half one day listening to the theme from Friends, Mad About You, The Simpsons, etc.
The best ever was when I called Symantec about fifteen years ago. Their 'Muzak on hold' machine had broken and someone had run out to their car in the parking lot and brought in their Sony Discman to plug into the phone system. The CD in the player was Bill Cosby's 'Wonderfulness' album. By the time tech support finally picked up the phone I was in a pretty good mood. Only good experience I ever had with Symantec tech support.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yeah, it dates from the old days, when Michael Jackson was still black.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
So my, my this here Anakin guy
May be Vader some day later
Now he's just a small fry
He left his toys, kissed his mommy goodbye
Saying soon I'm gonna be a Jedi
Soon I'm gonna be a Jedi
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
When I'm a-walkin', I strut my stuff, and I'm so strung out,
I'm high as a kite, I just might stop to check you out,
Let me go on, like a blister in the sun,
Let me go on, big hands I know you're the one
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I have a very easy way of dealing with these "earworms": The Imperial March/Darth Vader's Theme. I run that through my mind, and everything else flees.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I've been asking that for about 30 years now, and so far the answer is 'No'. I was 21 when I saw a newspaper article about Tinnitus, and was shocked. I just thought that everyone's ears rang all the time.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
I think this joke is better:
"Michael Jackson was proof of the American Dream, that you can become whoever you want to be. He was born a poor black man, and died a rich white woman."
He was born a poor black man...
That must have been a painful delivery.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.