"You are my little apple, I can't love you too much." "The vast horizon is my love, and the flowers are blooming at the foot of the green hills." "Come, draw a dragon with me on the left and draw a dragon on your right. A rainbow"... As you read these words, do you always have the urge to sing them out? The songs in the music market are updated all the time, but there are always one or two songs that will stay in your mind forever. Whenever you listen to someone sing, you will hum or continue to sing along unconsciously. Why? Will this be the case?
"Earworms" in Your Brain
On the way to work and school, you hear deafening music coming from the roadside shop, which happens to be a very familiar tune, and you can't help humming along. When you walk into the office or classroom, you can no longer hear the music, but the song is still playing in your head, humming from time to time while sitting in the seat, and singing it on the way to the toilet . At the end of the day, your colleagues/classmates can't stand you anymore, and you're driving yourself crazy. Has the above experience ever happened to you? If the answer is yes, no need to panic, it's just an earworm phenomenon.
"Earworm" is a literal translation from the German word Ohr wurm, which compares the music that "crawls" into the brain to a worm. The feeling caused by "earworm" is called "cognitive itching", which makes people feel I can't help but want to "scratch" (recall) it, which vividly summarizes the characteristics of the brainwashing Divine Comedy. The earworm phenomenon affects the vast majority of people, and studies show that 91.7% of people have had the above experience.
Why are earworms so powerful? Researchers at Dartmouth University found that when they played snippets of familiar songs to their subjects, the subjects' auditory cortex automatically completed the remaining songs -- in other words, their brains had already heard the songs. It will also continue "playing" when it ends. These tunes keep "tickling" your brain, and the only way to relieve the itch is to keep repeating the song in your head, so you're stuck in an endless loop of brainwashing songs.
Some researchers believe that the brainwashing Divine Comedy is like the white polar bear that was inexplicably asked not to think about it. You would not think of a white bear at first, but if you are told that you are forbidden to think about it, the more you will think about it, because While making sure I wasn't really thinking about a white polar bear, I was thinking about that white polar bear. The same is true of brainwashing Divine Comedy, the more you try not to think about it, the more you will think about it.
How to Get Rid of Earworms
Most of the time, earworms don't interfere with our normal work and study because it doesn't last long. But if, as described above, earworms linger or entangle repeatedly, and it is really annoying, what should we do?
First of all, we should figure out which songs are prone to earworms and which are not. Researchers at the Department of Applied Science and Art at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland have conducted such an experiment. They analyzed more than 50 popular songs, and tunes that were mentioned more than three times by different people were identified as "earworms". It was found that the note beats in earworm tunes are usually longer and the interval is smaller, which means that the music with these two characteristics is low in difficulty, and it is easy for ordinary people to be familiar with this kind of tune. Another team from the University of London summed up three key characteristics of "earworms": cheerful rhythm, simple melody and some special intervals. The first two ensure that the piece is simple enough for the brain to remember, and the third feature makes the piece stand out while maintaining a simple rhythm.
Once the presence of earworms is confirmed, we also need to know who and under what circumstances are most susceptible to earworms. Some studies have shown that musicians, active minds, or people who are stressed out develop earworms more often than the average person; gender-wise, women are more likely to trigger earworms than men. If you receive a lot of music in a short period of time, such as just listening to a concert, listening to car music for a long time, or listening to colleagues/classmates humming the Divine Comedy all day, earworms will also appear in your brain.
With the above knowledge in mind, we can find ways to get rid of earworms. Listening to some songs that don't have the characteristics of earworms and letting other songs replace earworms is a good way to go. If you really like this earworm song, you might as well listen to the whole song over and over again, because the earworm melody is usually just a short section of the music, and listening to the whole song will reduce the earworm effect.
In addition, the earworm is indeed like an uninvited white bear. When it appears in your mind, don't pay too much attention, don't listen to it, don't ignore it, and slowly it will disappear naturally.
The magical power of earworms
However, despite the name "bugs", earworms are not annoying most of the time, and are often even pleasurable. A study conducted by researchers at Bucknell University in the United States showed that more than half of the students considered the brainwashing song to be pleasing, 30% thought it was neutral, and only 15% of the brainwashing songs were considered to be uncomfortable. Isn't it fun to play a pleasant earworm in your head while you are busy with work and study?
Not only do earworms have the ability to relax, they also help strengthen memory. Because the earworm phenomenon is similar to the phenomenon of "involuntary memory retrieval" proposed by the famous German memory psychologist Ebbinghaus, once some retrieval clues appear, relevant information will be automatically triggered. For example, after watching a lot of various videos accompanied by "the most dazzling ethnic style", the next time you see a rhythmic dance, you will involuntarily sing "You are the most beautiful cloud in my sky".
If we replace the content of the video with something that needs to be remembered, can we recall the content of the video when we hear the "most dazzling national style" again? The answer is yes, as confirmed in 2021 by a team of psychologists at the University of California, Davis.
The researchers conducted three listening-memory experiments on three groups of participants, each with a 1-week interval, and the number of participants in each group was between 25 and 31. In the first experiment, participants listened to an unfamiliar piece of music, and a week later, they were asked to watch a movie clip while listening to the same piece of music, with participants in the control group watching only the movie clip without the soundtrack. In the final experiment, they were asked to answer some questions about the details of the movie while the music was playing, to test their memory performance. During the experiment, the researchers also asked participants about their evaluation of the song and how often the song looped in their brains.
The results of the study showed that the memory effect of the experimental group was significantly better than that of the control group, and the members of the experimental group had different memory levels for movies. Specifically, the more often a piece of music loops in a person's mind, the more he remembers the details of the film that paired the piece. What's more interesting is that even if the participant did not specifically remember the plot of the movie while watching the movie, if he recalled the music in his mind, he would also remember the corresponding plot of the movie. In short, the earworm effect helps people remember clips from movies. This means that music-based memory can not only strengthen people's memory, but also help people fight dementia and amnesia. In the future, music intervention therapy may become a non-drug therapy for memory loss.
After learning about the phenomenon of earworms, next time you are troubled by not being able to remember things, you might as well accompany a beautiful earworm song to remember.
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