Why do songs get stuck in our head?

I recently experienced a rather distressing event. It certainly wasn’t life threatening by any means, neither was it an event with any long lasting consequences but, nevertheless, it did cause some short-term concern. What was this thing? I hear you ask.

A few days ago I woke with the song Saviour’s Day by Cliff Richard spinning through my mind on what appeared to be a never-ending loop. For those familiar with this perennial ‘classic’, it was the chorus that repeated through my inner ear, you know, when Cliff sings, Open your eyes on Saviour’s day, don’t look back or turn away (you’re welcome). The reasons for the distress were multiple; first of all it just wouldn’t go and was still there late into the day. Secondly, the fact that we are in March was just annoying — why did I get a Christmas song stuck in my head in March for goodness sake? Finally, it was distressing because, well, Cliff.

I Just Can’t Get You Out Of My Head

The general term for this annoying phenomenon is earworm, although I quite like the technical term Involuntary Musical Imagery, or INMI. Oliver Sacks referred to such things as ‘sticky music’, which I also quite like, while consumer psychologist James Kallaris describes them as a ‘cognitive itch’.

Just like my Cliff problem, earworms usually consist of a fragment of the music, usually the chorus or hook; generally the catchy bit that maintains the rhythm of the song. Most importantly, earworms are what we refer to as involuntary, that is, we don’t consciously bring them to mind, they just pop up, seemingly from nowhere.

Of course, it’s not just music that appears in our heads uninvited, all types of memories can be involuntary, but music does seem to have a particular hold over and seems subjectively different to other types of memories. For example, research conducted by Professor Catherine Loveday, a neuropsychologist at the University of Westminster, UK, has found that our musical recollections often cluster around significant periods in our lives, the so-called reminiscence bump. As Loveday points out in her recent TEDx talk, humans are incredibly good at recognising a song within the first few seconds of hearing it, even if we don’t care particularly for the song itself. So we can maybe think of songs as our personal time machine, whizzing us back to when a particular tune meant something special to us.

We appear to be storing an incredible back catalogue of tunes in our long-term memory and even those people who seldom listen to music will still have the knowledge of the classics at their disposal or TV theme tunes and movie soundtracks. Earworms are, therefore, related to long-term memory but they appear to be getting stuck in our short-term memory or, more accurately, our working memory.

Thanks For The Memories

There really isn’t a great deal of research being done on earworms, but we can take what we have learned about memory over the past fifty years or so to speculate about what’s going on. One particularly influential model of short-term memory first devised in the 1970s by two British cognitive psychologists might be able to offer at least a partial explanation. In their model of working memory, Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch proposed that short-term memory is composed of a number of components that deal with different types of stimuli, such as images and sound. The sound-based component is called the phonological loop and is important when it comes to remembering and rehearsing information — it’s where we hold that telephone number until we can write it down or carry out mental arithmetic (among many other things). In reference to our earworm, the song gets stuck in this loop and just keeps going around and around like a hamster on exercise wheel. This explanation may also give us a clue as to how we can stop it. More on this later.

Stuck On Repeat

But why Saviour’s Day? And why not some other song that might cause less distress? In a 2011 paper, music psychologist Dr Victoria Williamson identified a number of factors that may lead to earworms, including exposure to music, memory triggers, affective states and low attention. The song that gets stuck is often likely to be one that we have been recently exposed to or have experienced repeated exposure. That doesn’t help with my problem because, with it being March, Christmas songs are a little thin on the ground.

How about triggers? We might associate a song with a person, a situation or even a word or a sound. I had been speaking to my mum the day before the unfortunate event and she’s always been a bit of a Cliff fan, but I think that’s a fairly tenuous connection. The situation didn’t really have any connection either, although I’ve recently moved and during Christmas our former home was filled with boxes and the festive period turned into a bit of a damp squib. Perhaps I was thinking about how different next Christmas will be?

Situational or environmental triggers are certainly powerful. Say you’re getting ready to go out for a meal with friends and a song from your youth starts playing on the radio. It’s the same song you’d listen to when you were teenager, getting ready to go out clubbing. The song means something; it links both the present situation to the past one; the present you to the younger you and, just for moment, we return to the past.

More Than Words

Words, and even a single word, can also trigger songs, like when someone says to me ‘I beg your pardon’ and I reply ‘I never promised you a rose garden’ — I used to think it was funny, but now it even annoys me (younger readers might have to Google that one). But the trigger might not even be a word; it could be a sound, such as an old style cash register reminding us of Pink Floyd’s Money. Or was it a song on the radio that reminds us of a smilier song; did you hear the introduction to One Direction’s Live While We’re Young and recall Should I Stay or Should I Go? by The Clash

Then again, it could be recollection; a song that sends us back in time or creates the anticipation of a future event.

Music is well known for its influence on our affective states, our subjective experience of feeling something. Our earworm tune might match our mood state or induce anxiety. Has our emotional state at the time encouraged the earworm or has our surprise at hearing it trapped it within our cognitive system where it repeats over again? Finally, it it related to our attention; is it left over from a dream or have we let it in while our mind has wandered?

Cure For The Itch

I don’t know if any of these explanations bring me any closer to solving my Cliff problem, but then perhaps I’m asking the wrong question. Maybe the question I should be asking is, how can I get rid of it? It did go with time, so perhaps just trying to ignore it and allowing it to fade naturally is the best option. Williamson suggests either listening to the entire song (a remedy I simply wasn’t prepared to try) or using a ‘cure’ song (note: Not a Cure song, although I’d much rather have Pictures of You stuck in my head than Saviour’s Day). Apparently, some of the best cure songs seem to be Happy Birthday to You, The A-Team theme, Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer and Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.

You could try a distraction task. Working memory is limited in its capacity to do more than one thing at a time. By attempting to carry out more than one sound based task simultaneously through what is known as articulatory suppression (when we repeat a meaningless sound or phrase over and over again), we might be able to overload the phonological loop and send Cliff packing. One study even found that chewing gum can help.

With Cliff now gone, I can get on with my life without his voice constantly running through my head. However, I have just discovered that Savour’s Day made it to number 1 in the UK after knocking off Vanilla Ice’s Ice, Ice Baby (Ice, Ice Baby, Alright, stop, collaborate and listen) — you’re welcome.