How earworms, those annoying musical fragments that repeat in our heads, may trigger memories and calming emotions
- Music is great for encoding and retrieving memories, a therapist says, rebuilding and strengthening pathways in the brain
- Learning names or new faces or places could be paired with an individual music fragment
In the dark corners of the internet hides a playlist of some of the most torturous, addictive music known to man. That’s right, Spotify, SoundCloud and Apple Music all have playlists of Baby Shark remixes. Do do, do do, do do, do.
Would you walk 500 miles to get away from that tune? Will your poker face crack the 1,000th time it plays in your head? Does it remind you of somebody that you used to know? Do you value the sound of silence?
You aren’t alone. These so-called earworms – gross – are annoying, but useful; new research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in June helps illuminate the exact function these loops play.
“We can hear just a fragment of a piece of music and it can take us back. How does that happen?” said Petr Janata, a researcher at the University of California, Davis.
Music therapists and marketers take advantage of music’s ability to trigger memory. An amateur musician, Janata says earworms help your brain encode and parse through daily memories and sensations that may not have anything to do with the exact moment you first heard the tune.