Tortured by an earworm? How to get it out of your head | Wicked

Something has changed within me – and it’s really bloody annoying!

Ever since Wicked stormed the global box office last month, many people have been holding space for the lyrics of Defying Gravity – which is to say, unable to get them out of their head.

Studies estimate that more than 90% of people experience such an “earworm” at least once a week – “so it’s a really common, everyday experience,” says Kelly Jakubowski, an associate professor of music psychology at Durham University. The song snippet is typically about 20 seconds long, and plays on stubborn repeat in your head. Not everyone is equally susceptible. “Mostly, it has to do with music exposure,” says Jakubowski. If you listen to music often, you’re more likely to find some of it gets “stuck”.

Typically, it tends to pass within a few hours or even minutes. Two-thirds of people who routinely experience earworms “don’t find them annoying”, says Jakubowski. But if you’re part of the third who do – whose earworms might prey on their mind for days at a time – what can you do to escape them?

First, it’s important to understand why some songs are more catchy than others. Wicked, for example, might be particularly fiendish, pairing evocative lyrics with memorable melodies – not to mention being inescapable at present. Jakubowski points to research by Callula Killingly, of Queensland University of Technology in Australia, which suggested a “mutually reinforcing” relationship between the catchiness of a particular song and people’s exposure to it.

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, if people feel the urge to sing along to a piece of music when they’re hearing it, they tend to more often get it stuck in their heads later on,” says Jakubowski. (You can imagine the converse, she adds: if a song is obscure and hard to sing, it’s unlikely to cause you undue trouble.)

Songs with faster tempos and “memorable but distinctive” melodies were more likely to be “musically sticky”, she adds. In a 2016 paper, Jakubowski singled out the opening riff of Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, the chorus of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance and (fittingly) Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head as having the potent mix of generic and unexpected.

Defying Gravity is riddled with interval jumps, including perfect fourths (as in Here Comes the Bride) and fifths (Star Wars) – greater than you might expect of a standard pop song – that catch our attention and get stuck in our heads. If you’re currently being bothered by an earworm, there are a couple of things you can try to bring yourself back down to earth.

First, listen to a different song – or even just think of it. “It’s nearly impossible to have two songs in your head at once: you just don’t have the cognitive resources to do that,” says Jakubowski.

In countering a deeply lodged earworm, it helps to reach for a song that is familiar but not too engaging. One survey led by Jakubowski found that God Save the King was the most effective. “Most people said that that song is so boring you can think of it easily, but it doesn’t get stuck itself.”

The other tactic you could try to shake a song is to chew gum. According to 2015 research from the University of Reading, study participants who chewed gum after being played catchy pop songs reported thinking of and “hearing” the song less often than those who didn’t. The lead author of the study suggested this simple strategy might be effective in countering other disruptive thoughts, by disrupting working memory.

“Essentially, when you’re singing something in your head, you’re sub-vocalising it … The same muscles that you’d need to actually speak, you need those [available] to mentally ‘speak’,” says Jakubowski. By keeping your jaw busy and your mouth “full”, “it actually kind of destroys the earworm”.

But, Jakubowski adds, it’s important to chew vigorously enough to prevent you from “talking” – and, crucially, not in time with the music. “If you’re chewing along with the beat, it could have the opposite effect.”

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