Chewing gum gets rid of that song stuck in your head
If that Maroon 5 tune is driving you to distraction, scientists have found a simple solution to banish such sounds and other intrusive thoughts
Think about all those cheesy songs from radio that get stuck in your head when you are trapped in a taxi or leaving your flat.
Ever have tunes like All by Myself, I've Never Been to Me, You Light Up My Life or I'll Always Love You playing over and over in your head like a migraine headache you can't get rid of? In German, the phenomenon is called ohrwurm, or earworms. Now science has found a reliable way to get rid of it - chew gum.
Yes, that's right. British researchers from the University of Reading have found that people who chew gum after hearing catchy songs think less often about the song. Chewing gum also reduces the amount they "hear" the song by one third.
"The majority of us experience them for only short periods - perhaps just a few minutes - but others can experience them for two or three days, which can be extremely frustrating and debilitating," said Phil Beaman, who led the study, from the university's School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences.
"We wanted to explore whether a simple act like chewing gum could help."
Previous research has found that mouthing something to yourself, or moving your jaw around, helps disrupt both short-term memory and sounds in your head. Beaman's team, whose study - "Want to block earworms from conscious awareness? B(u)y gum!" - has been published in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, focuses on the effects of chewing gun on "earworms".