There isn't a more frustrating feeling than trying to get a song out of your head. Whether you like the song or not, hearing "I'm all about that bass, 'bout that bass, no treble" repeat over and over and over again in your head is never fun.
But thanks to science, we no longer have to feel that pain. Researchers from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom have discovered what you should do when an earworm crawls into your head and it just won't get out. The remedy is as simple as chewing gum.
A study published by the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology explores the relationship between earworms, the beloved name of songs that get stuck in your head, and mental control by conducting three experiments to see how chewing gum affected the presence of an earworm in participants' heads. Now where did the researchers get the idea that chewing gum may help get rid of earworms in the first place? Well, the inspiration actually came from an online commenter who said that chewing on a cinnamon stick helped earworms go bye-bye. Could a similar motor activity interrupt "articulatory motor programming" that makes music pop into your head whether you mean for that to happen or not?
In the first experiment, participants had to listen to the chorus of David Guetta's very earworm-worthy "Play Hard" twice before being asked to chew gum or not chew gum if they were in the control group. The participants were then told to think about anything except the song for three minutes and then they were told to think freely for another three minutes. They had to press the "q" button on a keyboard every time they found themselves thinking about the music.
The second experiment was identical to the first, except that participants were asked to press a "q" key whenever they thought about the song and a "p" key whenever they actually heard the music playing in their heads. Finally, the third experiment was also the same as the first, except the song used was two minutes of "Payphone" by Maroon 5 and a third group of participants that tapped during the thought period was introduced. There were also three two-minute thought-suppression periods in this experiment.
In the first two experiments, the researchers found that yes, chewing gum does help get those nasty earworms out of your head. In fact, performing any motor activity can help you keep earworms at bay since the participants who tapped during the thought-suppression periods in the third experiment still experienced a smaller average number of earworms than the control group, although it wasn't as effective as chewing gum.
The reason why chewing gum works so well is because it interferes with some of the brain's regions responsible for earworms.
"Brain regions involved in hearing, remembering and imagining tunes include not only the auditory cortex but also regions more usually associated with speech production," Phil Beaman, one of the study's authors, told The Huffington Post in an email. "By forcing these regions to be active in chewing the gum, they were less available to support the involuntary generation or recollection of an earworm."
Now the next time you get the catchiest song ever in your head, you'll be ready.
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