Getting a random song stuck in your head is called an earworm. This happens because your brain likes patterns and repetition. Songs, especially catchy ones, have melodies and rhythms that make them easy to remember. Your brain might repeat a song more often if you’ve recently heard it or if it has a lot of easy to remember repetition in it. For a good month or so when wellerman first blew up during the pandemic, it was all that would play in my head because of how repetitive and easy to remember it was, now I can’t stand the song because I’m too sick of it.
It’s known as an earworm, and it comes from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a musical itch.
Term was coined in 1979 by the psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert, and basically, it’s a looped segment of music that’s usually about 20 seconds long and automatically comes into your awareness and keeps playing on repeat.
In short:
Music was used together with rhyming before the written word in many cultures to help people remember oral histories. Our brains evolved to remember these associations and these snippets.
What happens is that connections in our brains involving these regions get “stuck,” resulting in an automatic playing out of musical memories. Some research suggests that people who have difficulty with working memory, like those suffering from attention-deficit disorder, may experience earworms less, while people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, where there are these loops that play over involuntarily in their heads, may be more prone to earworms.
Comments
Getting a random song stuck in your head is called an earworm. This happens because your brain likes patterns and repetition. Songs, especially catchy ones, have melodies and rhythms that make them easy to remember. Your brain might repeat a song more often if you’ve recently heard it or if it has a lot of easy to remember repetition in it. For a good month or so when wellerman first blew up during the pandemic, it was all that would play in my head because of how repetitive and easy to remember it was, now I can’t stand the song because I’m too sick of it.
Answer:
It’s known as an earworm, and it comes from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a musical itch.
Term was coined in 1979 by the psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert, and basically, it’s a looped segment of music that’s usually about 20 seconds long and automatically comes into your awareness and keeps playing on repeat.
In short:
Music was used together with rhyming before the written word in many cultures to help people remember oral histories. Our brains evolved to remember these associations and these snippets.
What happens is that connections in our brains involving these regions get “stuck,” resulting in an automatic playing out of musical memories. Some research suggests that people who have difficulty with working memory, like those suffering from attention-deficit disorder, may experience earworms less, while people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, where there are these loops that play over involuntarily in their heads, may be more prone to earworms.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/12/harvard-scientist-on-why-that-song-is-stuck-in-your-head/
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17105759
https://www.prevention.com/health/a61037910/why-do-songs-get-stuck-in-your-head/
https://www.wired.com/story/why-songs-get-stuck-in-your-head-how-to-stop-them/
I googled all this and pasted here, it took me 5 minutes. Please don’t ask such googleable questions.