If Miley Cyrus has planted “Flowers” in your head, rest assured you’re not alone.
An earworm – a bit of music you can’t shake from your brain – happens to almost everyone.
The culprit is typically a song you’ve heard repeatedly with a strong rhythm and melody (like Miley’s No. 1 hit this year).
It pops into your head and stays there, unbidden and often unwanted. As you fish for something new on Spotify, there’s always a chance that a catchy hook holds an earworm.
“A catchy tune or melody is the part of a song most likely to get stuck in a person’s head, often a bit from the chorus,” said Elizabeth H. Margulis, PhD, a professor at Princeton (N.J.) University and director of its music cognition lab. The phenomenon, which has been studied since 1885 (way before earbuds), goes by such names as stuck song syndrome, sticky music, musical imagery repetition, intrusive musical imagery, or the semi-official term, involuntary musical imagery, or INMI.
Research confirms how common it is. A 2020 study of American college students found that 97% had experienced an earworm in the past month, similar to findings from a larger Finnish survey done more than 10 years ago.
One in five people had experienced an earworm more than once a day, the study found. The typical length was 10-30 minutes, though 8.5% said theirs lasted more than 3 hours. Levels of “distress and interference” that earworms caused was mostly “mild to moderate.”
Some 86% said they tried to stop it – most frequently by distraction, like talking to a friend or listening to another song.
If music is important to you, your earworms are more likely to last longer and be harder to control, earlier research found. And women are thought to be more likely to have them.
“Very musical people may have more earworms because it’s easy for them to conjure up a certain tune,” says David Silbersweig, MD, chairman of the department of psychiatry and codirector of the Institute for the Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Moreover, people who lack “psychological flexibility” may find earworms more bothersome. The more they try to avoid or control intrusive thoughts (or songs), the more persistent those thoughts become.
“This is consistent with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) research on the paradoxical effect of thought suppression,” the authors of the 2020 study wrote. In fact, people who report very annoying or stressful earworms are more likely to have obsessive-compulsive symptoms.
That makes them worth a closer look.
Digging for the source of earworms
Scientists trace earworms to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain, which controls how you perceive music, as well as deep temporal lobe areas that are responsible for retrieving memories. Your amygdala and ventral striatum, parts of your brain that involve emotion, also tie into the making of an earworm.
MRI experiments found that “INMI is a common internal experience recruiting brain networks involved in perception, emotions, memory and spontaneous thoughts,” a 2015 paper in Consciousness and Cognition reported.
These brain networks work in tandem if you connect a song to an emotional memory – that’s when you’re more likely to experience it as an earworm. The “loop” of music you’ll hear in your head is usually a 20-second snippet.
Think of it as a “cognitive itch,” as researchers from the Netherlands put it. An earworm can be triggered by associating a song with a specific situation or emotion. Trying to suppress it just reminds you it’s there, “scratching” the itch and making it worse. “The more one tries to suppress the songs, the more their impetus increases, a mental process known as ironic process theory,” they wrote.
“It’s also worth pointing out that earworms don’t always occur right after a song ends,” said Michael K. Scullin, PhD, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Tex. “Sometimes they only occur many hours later, and sometimes the earworm isn’t the song you were most recently listening to.”
These processes aren’t fully understood, he said, “but they likely represent memory consolidation mechanisms; that is, the brain trying to reactivate and stabilize musical memories.” Kind of like switching “radio stations” in your head.