Want to block earworms from conscious awareness?
B(u)y gum!

Abstract

Three experiments examine the role of articulatory motor planning in experiencing an involuntary musical recollection (an “earworm”). Experiment 1 shows that interfering with articulatory motor programming by chewing gum reduces both the number of voluntary and the number of involuntary—unwanted—musical thoughts. This is consistent with other findings that chewing gum interferes with voluntary processes such as recollections from verbal memory, the interpretation of ambiguous auditory images, and the scanning of familiar melodies, but is not predicted by theories of thought suppression, which assume that suppression is made more difficult by concurrent tasks or cognitive loads. Experiment 2 shows that chewing the gum affects the experience of “hearing” the music and cannot be ascribed to a general effect on thinking about a tune only in abstract terms. Experiment 3 confirms that the reduction of musical recollections by chewing gum is not the consequence of a general attentional or dual-task demand. The data support a link between articulatory motor programming and the appearance in consciousness of both voluntary and unwanted musical recollections.

Keywords:

• Earworms
• Auditory imagery
• Thought suppression
• Music cognition
• Short-term memory

We are grateful to Rozeena Zeb and Ayyub Hanid for their help in running Experiment 3. Thanks to Lassi Liikkanen for drawing our attention to the quotation from E. A. Poe's (1845/1938) short story, The Imp of the Perverse.

The research reported in this article was partly supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number ES/L00710X/1 awarded to the first author].

Notes

¹The interviewees quoted here were an academic philosopher who reports hearing a “perpetual music track”, Martin Evans, and the Director of Music at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Edward Wickham.

²However, a contrasting pattern—poorer memory for previously ignored material that is now being re-presented for recall (Marsh, Beaman, Hughes, & Jones, 2012)—has also been reported.

³“Earworms” are highly idiosyncratic and individual when encountered in an everyday setting, a situation that is difficult to replicate experimentally, but we take the experiential aspect of unwanted music playing “in the head” (which this experiment has replicated) to be the defining features of the phenomenon.