The science of the earworm
Why songs get stuck on loop, why it's almost always the chorus, and the oddly effective trick for evicting one.
An earworm — that song fragment looping in your head — has a wonderfully nerdy real name: an involuntary musical image. And it’s almost never the whole song. It’s a short, catchy, slightly-too-simple hook, usually the chorus.
One leading idea is that your memory hates an unfinished loop. A catchy phrase that doesn’t fully resolve leaves a little open circuit, and your brain keeps re-running it trying to close it. Which points at the strangely effective fix: finish the song. Listening to it all the way through can let the loop finally complete — or chew some gum, which occupies the same mental machinery.
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