London - It may not be the most serious of life’s problems, but an incredibly irritating one nonetheless – getting a pop song ‘stuck’ in your head, playing over and over.
And much like for a bout of the hiccups, there seem to be few cures for ‘stuck-song syndrome’. Even listening to other music can fail to expel the offending tune which, ironically, tends to be one we didn’t even like much in the first place.
Now scientists believe the phenomenon, technically known as an ‘earworm’, could have a remedy after all. They found that solving simple verbal puzzles, such as anagrams, forces the annoying music out of our working memory.
Researchers at Western Washington University played catchy pop songs to volunteers and then gave them puzzles to work on. They found these made the ‘earworms’ disappear – with simple five-letter anagram puzzles, giving the best results.
While Sudoku could help also stop annoying tunes getting stuck, the puzzles had little effect if they were too difficult.
And any word games that were too tricky could also allow the irritating melodies back in, the experiments revealed.
Dr Ira Hyman, a music psychologist who conducted the study, said: ‘Verbal tasks like anagrams or reading a good novel seem to be very good at keeping earworms out.
However, he added, the key is to find something that will give the right level of challenge, where there is not much space left in the brain. ‘Something we can do automatically like driving or walking means you are not using all of your cognitive resource, so there is plenty of space left for that internal jukebox to start playing. You need to find that bit in the middle.’
The researchers also found the most common earworms tend to be popular songs that are in the charts or are particularly well known. They found Lady Gaga was the most common artist to get stuck, with Beyonce and The Beatles close behind. - Daily Mail