Earworms

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

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.