Perhaps you have had an earworm recently.
Indeed, perhaps you have one right now. This may be an opportune moment to
discuss the matter.
WHAT IS AN EARWORM?
Ear:
Worm:
An earworm (the word comes from the German “Ohrwurm”) is a small
parasitic worm which crawls into your ear and from there into your brain. Once
it is in your brain, it ceases to be a worm as we know it and takes on the form
of the trashy pop song that was playing in the shop you were in ten minutes ago.
Not the whole song, however – just a
few seconds of it, on a loop that goes round and round and round and round and
round and round in your head.
This process is technically known as a “cognitive itch”. The worm, as
it passes over a certain area of your brain, causes an itch, which it then
scratches by walking over the area again, which makes it itch even more, which
is why it goes round and round and round and round.
Although considerable research has been done, several questions remain
to be answered, such as what songs are most predisposed to take on earworm form
(simple, repetitive songs, it has been suggested but not confirmed), whether it
is due to the nature of the song itself or simply level and recentness of
exposure that wormifies a song, and whether certain types of people (such as
musicians) are more prone to infection.
If you want
to contribute to research on earworms, you can log yours at www.earwormery.com, run by researchers at
Goldsmiths, University of London. These researchers continually get asked at
cocktail parties, “What are the top ten earworms?” and they sigh and explain
that it is very hard to give a reliable list. There are over a thousand songs
logged on their list, but very few of them appear more than five or six times –
so a song does not have to be logged that many times before it makes its way to
the “top ten”.
If you want your own earworm, I was amused to discover, you can buy one
on Amazon. If you skim through a whole lot of
Earworms language courses, you eventually get to an earworm which is going to destroy the world,
,
an MP3 download of Earworm by Raun MacKinnon Burnham (£0.79),
the decidedly creepy-looking S/T 7" (45) UK EARWORM 1997
(1 used from £6.29):
which I hope never to have stuck in my brain, and the exhaustive(and exhausting)- sounding but
presumably enlightening
My recent earworms:
- Who by fire, by Leonard
Cohen. I woke up with this in my head one morning, and couldn’t get rid of
it for three days. Leonard Cohen songs tend to be quite sticky, I find.
- Boys don’t cry, by some
woman in an improbable-looking catsuit. One of the unspeakably awful pop
songs I am regularly subjected to at the gym.
- Danzon no. 2, by Arturo
Marquez. I don’t mind this one at all. It is a marvellous, fiesta-ish
piece of music, good for doing housework to, whether out loud or in your
head.
- Love story, by Taylor
Swift. I listened to it three times in two days, and it didn’t manifest
until several months later.
- Carey, by Joni
Mitchell. A delightful song, by any standards, but personally, I think the
earworm plays it better than Joni does.
- Theme music from Plants
vs. Zombies, the silliest (but also the most addictive) computer game you
will ever play.
