I
just met you... this is crazy... here’s my
number… call me maybe?”
These words have been repeating in my
head for several hours now. They say noth-
ing to me about my life (I haven’t just met
anyone, and the last time I gave someone my
number I was bombarded with PPI calls), but
they are becoming a repetitive mantra due to
the naggingly insistent pop tune behind them.
I only have myself to blame. I was looking
into the curious but very common phenom-
enon of ‘earworms’ – a condition where a
passage from a song, often one you don’t
even like, gets stuck in your head for hours
or sometimes days at a time, and will not
budge.
One survey found that Carly Rae Jepsen’s
2012 hit Call Me Maybe is a song frequently
identified as having powerful earworm qual-
ities. I foolishly played it a couple of times on
Youtube and, yes, you guessed it, now it’s
got its hooks in me.
Of course, having a random song stuck
in your head is a pretty trifling, first world
problem to have, but it can reach the point of
mild torture. When mountaineer Joe Simpson
(author of Touching The Void) lay on the
verge of death from hypothermia and thirst
after falling down a crevasse in the Peruvian
Andes, he found he had Boney M’s ‘Brown
Girl In The Ring’ broadcasting in his brain
so relentlessly that he began to hallucinate
that the song was actually playing for real
from a radio somewhere nearby. His abiding
thought was “I won’t want to die to Boney
M”.
This would undoubtedly be a particularly per-
nicious form of earworm because the verse
(“Show me a motion…”) segues seamlessly
into the chorus with a very similar tune, and
then seems to flow irresistibly back into the
chorus like you’re exiting through one door
then finding yourself back at square one
through the next. So it’s potentially an ear-
worm without end. Maddening stuff.
Thankfully science has made some inroads
into combating this terror of our times.
They’ve even given it a name – Involuntary
musical imagery, or INMI. Dr Vicky William-
son, a memory expert at London’s Goldsmith
College, found that there were several
common triggers for such INMIs. In some
cases, like Joe Simpson’s, it was stress, as
if the brain is trying to combat the anxiety
by automatically turning to music, with its
proven ability to release pleasure hormones
such as serotonin. One case study she found
regularly got Bananarama’s version of ‘Na-
than Jones’ stuck in her head while taking an
exam at 16, and found it returning “at every
single moment of stress in her life – wedding,
childbirth, everything,” reports Williamson.
Another common breeding ground for
earworms is, oddly enough, pretty much the
opposite mental state, when you’re per-
forming a relatively routine task that can be
completed pretty much on autopilot, such
as driving or riding a bike, and your mind is
wandering. In a survey conducted last year
by Dr Ira Hyman, a music psychologist at
Western Washington University, he found
that solving anagrams or sudokus reduced
the incidence of INMIs because you’re more
susceptible when not ‘cognitively engaged’.
In other words, the devil will make work for
idle brains to do. And that work may well
EARWORM
SCIENCE OF THE
WORDS // JOHNNY SHARP
36 //
