A deep dive into earworms, an essay so potent — and dare we say catchy — that you won’t be able to get it out of your head…
by: David Raney
I‘m sure it’s happened to you. A song, or a line from one, gets stuck in your head and just won’t leave. Earworms, also called brainworms or “stuck song syndrome,” are experienced by about 98% of us, according to people who research such things, and by men and women equally.
Whether you like an earworm or despise it, those endless loops can be maddening, like a record skipping backward every 10 seconds. The British Journal of Psychology claims this is “more common in those with an interest in music,” which may explain why I get them so often, as I’ve been obsessed with music since my teens. They’re also more likely to be songs with lyrics, not instrumentals, which also makes sense because our brains are made for language, with special areas for hearing it, and language evolved from music — or vice versa, depending on which scientist you ask. Animals like apes and dogs can be soothed by music, but they don’t get mired in it, and for them it tends to be classical, Bach and Brahms, not some ancient Top 40 song you caught a snippet of in the car, with the hook that now you can’t not hear.
It isn’t just 21st century humans. Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke (1957) and E.B. White (1933) feature earworms, the latter “reducing the citizens of all nations to mindless insanity,” and Mark Twain published a story back in 1886 called “A Literary Nightmare” with “a jingle that one can get rid of only by transferring it to another person.”
Researchers can’t agree on an antidote, or even on what makes a worm a worm: unusual melodies or predictable ones, fast or slow tempo, repetition, alliteration. But most admit that an earworm’s “parasitic characteristics” can’t be controlled despite our best efforts, and that their catchiness, depending on how “digestible” the music is to the listener, “has a level of annoyance unlike anything else.”
Scientists have long known that music, as Patrick Porter of Brain Tap Technologies puts it, “activates multiple brain systems simultaneously: emotional centers, memory networks.” Even trees give off measurable vibrations — music essentially — which can promote rest and reduce stress, and repeated listening to any good vibrations (sorry, another potential worm) can strengthen neural pathways. As audio expert Nikki Camilleri told a Post interviewer, songs can be “a shortcut to a target mental state.”
Earworms, then, take advantage of a power music has over us, one we can cultivate but not entirely control. And you’ll be happy to know that their parasitic pull has been put to at least one good use. Remember the song “Jenny” from 1981? Its alternative title “867-5309” was the number we were supposed to “for a good time call,” and it became the most famous phone number in music. (At one point it was also the second most popular computer password.) Now, though, the number reaches not Jenny but the Cancer Support Community hotline, which songwriter Tommy Heath teamed up with after a cancer scare of his own. As one of their ads puts it:
“Hey, it’s Jenny. Yeah, that Jenny. People call my number all the time to see who picks up — and I love that you all know my number better than your own mother’s. But it’s time the number did some good.”
My nagging question about worm-songs, though, is not whether they bring ease or insanity, or which neurons are involved, but: What is our brain doing holding onto them against our will? Are they our brains, or aren’t they?
That concept brings to mind Star Trek’s ominous Borg, but true cyborgs aren’t robots, they’re humans with some function enhanced by electronic or mechanical components — which, importantly, they control. Popular entertainment versions include RoboCop, Cyborg from the Justice League, and Inspector Gadget, but there are millions of cyborgs outside science fiction, because those components can be as complicated as the “cyborg antenna” British Artist Neil Harbisson had implanted in his head to extend his color perception, or as everyday as pacemakers, prostheses and hearing aids. Some definitions even include computers and the internet, as well as retro non-technologies like “pen and paper, speech and language,” with which, I have to agree as a lifelong reader and writer, “a person becomes capable of more than they were before.”
So we aren’t Borgs, or robots or zombies, but when we do what our brains tell us and feel more like the doer than the teller, it can seem not far off. As Tom Stafford told the BBC in 2012: “That our minds are not a unity is one of the basic insights of modern psychology and cognitive neuroscience. To a psychologist — or at least to this psychologist — the most interesting thing about earworms is that they show a part of our mind that’s clearly outside of our control.”
Maybe music is our collective version of the Borg, our human “hive mind.” Because as powerful as language is, a worm is never just title or lyrics. Neurologist Oliver Sacks, in his essay “Musicophilia,” calls earworms “a sign of the overwhelming, and at times helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music.” Music’s power of enchantment, something intrinsic to us but absent from androids or AI, shows up in its roots: enchant, like cantata and Spanish cantar, means “to sing.”
If I try to imagine a world without music, I wind up thinking about my first Springsteen concert in 1981, twenty thousand arms swaying like kelp to Clarence’s “Jungleland” solo, his eyes squeezed shut but peeking once at the crowd before sending that sax out beyond the lights, the darkness. And another show in 2009 in Philadelphia, when I went to grab a beer and found every last person in the concourse singing “Glory Days”: young, old, black, white, tattooed and not, burly bartender with gold earrings, somebody’s mom.
I think about the piazza in Siena, a day I’d like to fix and keep. My wife and I sat in the bright cold air as a group dressed all in black appeared in the distance. We labeled them the Goth Tour until they got closer and we realized it was a group of priests. Later we heard someone singing — really, really well — and it turned out to be one of them, an impossibly good-looking young man serenading his friends with Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.” I imagined them prodding him into it: Go on, let’s have one. The piazza strollers cheered and persuaded him to sing another, which I didn’t recognize, then finally “O Sole Mio,” with the locals joining in lustily on the chorus. Much applause and backslapping, and everyone slowly dispersed. Later we spotted them from a shop window, near some steps leading to the winding stone streets. On the chance he might sing again we stepped outside and were rewarded with Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” stunningly beautiful, enough to make me forswear my pagan ways. I expected the pierced skateboarders occupying the steps, his only other audience, to snicker at priests and tourists both, but they sat and listened, nodding to each other as the band of brothers climbed the steps and vanished.
I remember an afternoon closer to home. I’m waiting for my pizza to arrive when “Gimme Shelter” starts up on the restaurant sound system, those eerie oohs, that dark careful guitar, a guitar crossing a minefield. I notice a twenty-something white guy bobbing his head near the bar, a sixtyish Black couple doing the same at a table by the window. “Yeah, a storm is threatening my very life today.” When Merry Clayton launches her spine-freezing vocal — “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away” — and Mick answers “Love, sister, it’s just a kiss away,” the older guy looks out the window for a second then says something to his wife, who nods appreciatively. A small thing, but it’s not that often you feel people connecting. So much of the time we’re walled off in cubicles, staring at iPhones, stuck in traffic.
For me it almost always happens with a soundtrack. So the next time I get an earworm, either nostalgic or irritating, I’ll try to remember it’s a part of something that’s been helping us be human for 40,000 years. That’s a part of my brain I can live with.
David Raney is a writer and editor living near Greenville SC with his family and a Jeep-sized dog called Oscar, who brings him his best ideas. His work has shown up in several dozen places and been listed four times in Best American Essays.
