Blogs

Jingle Bell, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way!…

Sorry. I know the season is over, but that song is lodged in my brain. No doubt you've had that experience, when a song pops into your head and won't go away. Scientists who study such things call these malevolent melodies "earworms." In other words, the songs worm their way into your mind. And thanks for that visual, professors.

"Fundamentally, an earworm is your brain singing," says British researcher Dr. Victoria Williamson in an interview in Science Friday. Dr. Williamson is an authority on how music affects our minds and behavior. The good doctor asserts that most earworms are either pleasant or neutral and that only 30 percent are annoying. I would dispute those findings. Few of them are pleasant, and 90 percent are irritating. She also claims that earworms tend to last eight seconds. You could have fooled me.

Almost everyone - more than 90 percent of us - has earworms at least once a week. A lucky 25 percent have them more than once a day. That would include me.

A month ago my brain was bursting with "Jingle Bells" and "It's Beginning to Look Like Christmas." I don't happen to celebrate Christmas, but with the muzak tracks in every store, restaurant and public space it was hard not to wind up with seasonal songs playing between my ears. There are some very pleasant Christmas songs. In fact, I'm partial to "Do You Hear What I Hear?" Somehow none of the good ones made their way into the cranial wormhole.

I asked my hairdresser and the salesman in the Verizon store if the in-house soundtracks ever got to them. My hairdresser rolled her eyes and sighed. The Verizon guy said, "You have no idea."

Earworm experts don't completely understand what triggers them, and it's hard to track therm. (Unless the early bird catches the earworm.) Study subjects keep diaries; that must be fun. Among the songs which tend to enable earworm larvae are "What Does the Fox Say?" and "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

These intrepid scientists are also looking into the function of a person's mood in creating earworms. This could lead to a chicken-or-egg conundrum: does the earworm cause a bad mood or does a bad mood lead to an earworm?

The military has caught on to this phenomenon, sometimes employing what has been called music torture. This is the tactic of subjecting prisoners to loud or non-stop music to get them to give up important information. After the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989, the country's dictator, Manuel Noriega, took refuge in the Vatican embassy. Troops surrounded the embassy and opened aural fire, bludgeoning his brain with hits including, naturally, Van Halen's "Panama."

Noriega surrendered within a week. It has been reported that Iraqi prisoners of war were subjected to the theme songs from "Sesame Street" and "Barney." Some things truly are beyond the pale. The Geneva Convention did not anticipate a purple dinosaur.

Once we're infected, though, there are ways to deworm our brains. Williamson says the best method is to distract yourself with other music or conversation. Other suggestions, of which I am skeptical, are to listen to the earworm repeatedly or listen to the entire song.

The Science Friday article includes a playlist of 149 songs identified by Facebook and Twitter users as most likely to induce earworms. I was afraid to read the list, lest they all congregate in my gray matter.

It seems that there isn't much we can do to prevent ear worms, although being judicious in what we listen to might be just the thing to prevent us from opening a can of earworms.

- Ann Green

Ann Green is a freelance writer, editor, PR consultant and tutor.