Why do we get snippets of songs stuck in our heads? And are earworms more common with OCD?

You’re reading a report and trying to concentrate. The room is silent. But despite your best efforts to focus, a little snatch of melody – an “earworm” – keeps circling inside your head.

Research suggests most people get earworms regularly – and they’re more common among people who listen to a lot of music. One Finnish study found more than 90% of people report experiencing earworms at least weekly. About 60% of people experienced them daily.

Why does your brain insist on inflicting snippets of tunes like Jingle Bells, Bohemian Rhapsody or Golden when you try to clear your mind or at random times during the day?

And how are people with conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) affected?

What turns a song into an earworm?

A song is more likely to become an earworm when you’ve heard it often or recently.

In a 2015 study, we played an unfamiliar song to participants either two or six times, and then contacted them at random times during the three days afterwards to ask if the songs were stuck in their heads.

About one-third of participants reported experiencing an earworm at the time of contact. We also found that earworms of the songs in the experiment were more common if participants heard the song six times, and were most common in the day afterwards.

Read more: Earworms: why some songs get stuck in our heads more than others

What’s going on in our brain?

Research shows brain function is broadly similar when people listen to music and when they experience musical imagery like earworms. The word imagery here refers to the imagined nature of the earworm – it’s not a sound that we are hearing out loud, it is instead within our minds.

But part of the brain called the auditory association cortex (which does more complex brain tasks related to music listening) seems to be playing a bigger role with musical imagery than the primary auditory cortex (which does more of the basic tasks).

Another interesting finding concerns people with congenital amusia, a condition which means they don’t hear music as effectively as everyone else. This might mean they’re not good at telling if something is out of tune, and struggle to remember melodies they just heard.

Researchers found that while their brains might not be as good at analysing music, they still experienced earworms, though less frequently.

What have earworms got to do with memory?

What earworms seem to be doing when we experience them is getting into a part of our cognitive architecture called working memory. We use working memory when we have to remember something someone just told us, or when we do maths in our head.

Australian researchers have found that people doing tasks that test their working memory aren’t as accurate at remembering things if they have a song stuck in their head. The earworm is crowding out other information in working memory.

In another study, the same Australian researchers found that the more familiar people were with the songs, the more likely it was that the song stuck in their head was interfering with their working memory.

So what are earworms for?

While the earworms we don’t like can be really annoying and stand out, research suggests most earworms are a relatively pleasant experience.

German researchers have argued earworms are essentially a sort of withdrawal response to not hearing music. Sometimes we want to listen to music but can’t, which might mean that your withdrawal symptom is an earworm.

British researchers also found the earworms people experience reflect the reasons why those people listen to music. So if people often listen to music to rev themselves up, their earworms will often also be songs that would rev them up.

What’s the experience of people with OCD?

Earworms can sometimes be troubling for people with conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), who have unwanted thoughts come into their head. Earworms can be just another unwanted thought.

However, research is mixed on whether people with OCD experience more earworms than other people as a result of their condition. Some research suggests that, while people with OCD are more troubled by earworms, they don’t usually experience them more often than anyone else.

Other research does find they experience earworms more often. But it’s possible that people with OCD are just much more aware of their earworms, and such results can reflect that awareness.

Researchers have suggested the best therapeutic approach for people with OCD troubled by earworms is in context of broader treatments such as exposure and response prevention. This aims to reduce the negative response patterns that occur in response to intrusive thoughts.

How do I remove an unwanted earworm?

Some some British researchers have found that chewing gum might be the answer to getting rid of unwanted earworms, as odd as that sounds.

If earworms are going around our working memory, this actually makes sense – our memory is partly held in our “inner voice”, which involves using the throat to “subvocalise”.

So if you engage your throat muscles by chewing on some gum, this may disrupt the looping earworms just enough for them to end. If your earworm is bothering you, it’s worth a try.

Or try listening to something else, as people tend not to experience earworms when listening to other music. That can work for getting the song out of your head right now – but then you might get earworms of all the other songs.

But there’s little evidence that listening to the whole song will get rid of an earworm. Research suggests that listening to the song increases the likelihood the song will then get stuck in your head.