By Daniel, ESL Educator & Everyday Curiosities Writer
Maya hears a pop song for about thirty seconds in a coffee shop. Six hours later, she is brushing her teeth, and the chorus is still playing in her head, over and over, like a radio she can’t switch off.
If this has happened to you, you’ve had an earworm. Scientists have a more serious name for it: involuntary musical imagery, which simply means music that plays in your mind without you choosing to play it.
Quick answer: Songs that get stuck tend to be ones we’ve heard recently and often, with a fairly fast tempo, a simple overall shape and one small surprise in the melody. A tune is more likely to come back when your mind has some free space, and the habit is so common that most people experience it every week.
A word borrowed from German
“Earworm” is a loan translation of the German word Ohrwurm, literally “ear worm.” According to the language site Word Histories, the word first meant an insect, the earwig. Its modern meaning, a catchy tune you can’t get out of your head, came much later. In English, the musical sense starts appearing in print around the late 1970s and 1980s. The picture fits: a tiny creature crawls into your ear and won’t leave.
You are far from alone
In one large survey, the researcher Lassi Liikkanen asked 12,519 Finnish internet users about earworms, and 89.2% said they had a song stuck in their head at least once a week. People who practiced or listened to more music reported earworms more often, and earworms became less frequent with age.
His conclusion: this is not a strange glitch but a normal part of the musical mind.
What makes a tune sticky: a checklist
In a study published online in 2016 in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, Kelly Jakubowski, then at Goldsmiths, University of London, and her colleagues asked 3,000 people to name the songs that most often got stuck in their heads. They then compared those songs with similar songs that were just as popular but were never named. Here is what the stuck songs had in common, plus one finding from a separate study:
- ✔ It was a hit, and a recent one. Songs with more success and more recent time in the UK music charts were named more often.
- ✔ It moves along quickly. Earworm songs had faster average tempos than the comparison songs.
- ✔ Its overall shape is familiar. The melodies followed common patterns found in Western pop. The study’s example is the children’s song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” whose first phrase rises and whose second phrase falls.
- ✔ It has one unusual detail. Inside that familiar shape, the stuck songs often had something less common, such as unexpected jumps between notes or more repeated notes than usual.
- ✔ You actually like it. A separate study led by Ira Hyman at Western Washington University found that songs people enjoyed, and had heard recently, were more likely to become earworms.
So the recipe seems to be “familiar, but not too familiar.” Your brain can follow the tune easily, yet a small surprise keeps it interesting.
Is your brain trying to finish the song?
You may have read that songs get stuck because you only heard part of them. The idea comes from the Zeigarnik effect, named after the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who in a 1927 report said that people remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. Since an earworm is usually a short piece of a song, the theory says your brain keeps replaying it to “complete” it.
It’s a neat story, but the evidence is weak. Hyman’s team suggested the link, yet in their own experiments, playing only part of a song did not make it more likely to get stuck than playing the whole thing. And a 2025 meta-analysis by Romain Ghibellini and Beat Meier, which combined many studies of the Zeigarnik effect, found no general memory advantage for unfinished tasks. People do tend to want to return to unfinished tasks, but the memory part doesn’t hold up well. So treat “your brain wants to finish the song” as an interesting idea, not a proven explanation.
Getting rid of an earworm: myth vs. fact
Myth: There’s nothing you can do except wait.
Fact: Chewing gum may help. In a 2015 study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Phil Beaman and colleagues at the University of Reading played catchy songs to 98 volunteers. When they chewed gum, people thought of the song less often, and “heard” it about a third less, than when they did nothing or tapped their fingers. The researchers think chewing interferes with the silent “inner voice” we use to repeat sounds.
Myth: Any distraction will do.
Fact: The difficulty matters. Hyman’s team found that tasks that were too hard produced more earworms. The lesson seems to be: choose something absorbing but not overwhelming, such as a moderately difficult puzzle.
Myth: Playing the song again will only make it worse.
Fact: Jakubowski has suggested the opposite, and reports on Hyman’s study give the same tip: listening to the whole song, start to finish, can sometimes break the loop. This is advice from researchers rather than a firmly tested cure, so think of it as worth a try.
Next time a song won’t leave, try one of these and notice how long the song keeps playing.
You might also like: Why Do We Remember Some Moments Clearly and Forget Others Completely?
Useful words from this story
- earworm: a song or tune that keeps playing in your head
- catchy: easy to remember and pleasant to hear (“a catchy tune”)
- get stuck in your head: keep repeating in your mind, even when you don’t want it to
- on a loop: repeating again and again without stopping
- break the loop: stop something that keeps repeating
A Note from Daniel
I wrote this article the way I would want to read it myself — not as a lecture, but as a real attempt to understand a small weird thing that happens to all of us. The science of earworms is still developing, and that is part of what makes it interesting. A simple song can open a door into memory, attention, and the strange habits of the mind.
Sources
- Jakubowski, K., Finkel, S., Stewart, L. and Müllensiefen, D. “Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 11(2), 2017 (online 2016). research.gold.ac.uk
- “Psychologists Identify Key Characteristics of Earworms.” American Psychological Association press release, 2016. apa.org
- Liikkanen, L. A. “Musical activities predispose to involuntary musical imagery.” Psychology of Music, 2012. journals.sagepub.com
- “How to kill an earworm” (on Hyman et al., Applied Cognitive Psychology). BPS Research Digest, British Psychological Society. bps.org.uk
- Ghibellini, R. and Meier, B. “Interruption, recall and resumption: a meta-analysis of the Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina effects.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025. ideas.repec.org
- “Listen up – new research shows chewing gum could remove that stuck record in your head.” University of Reading press release, 2015. reading.ac.uk
- “How to stop songs from getting stuck in our heads? Chew some gum.” PsyPost, 2015. psypost.org
- “Zeigarnik effect.” Wikipedia (used as a pointer to sources). wikipedia.org
- “‘Earworm’: meanings and origin.” Word Histories, 2021. wordhistories.net
- “Earworm.” Wikipedia (used as a pointer to sources). wikipedia.org
Stay curious, and the ordinary will start to speak. — Daniel