We all sometimes encounter a situation when this or that melody gets stuck in our head. This is annoying for many: on the Internet, users often wonder how to get rid of a sticky song.
In Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Imp of Contradiction", the hero compares obsessive, paranoid thoughts with a motive annoyingly spinning in his head: “Often in our ears, or rather, in our memory, the chorus of some vulgar song or unremarkable fragments of an opera is spinning ... And our torment will not diminish if the song itself is good, and the operatic motive is worthy of appreciation. Likewise, I finally began to catch myself constantly thinking about my safety and hardly audibly repeating to myself under my breath: "There is nothing to be afraid of." British psychologist Philip Beeman of the University of Reading provides a detailed overview of the melody effect.
In relation to such musical fragments, English-speaking researchers use the term earworm(literally - "earworm"). "Worms" can take the form of either a complete piece of music, or, more often, be a small piece, and its length is estimated to be about 15-30 seconds on average. Usually it is a separate, but complete musical phrase or a large structural element, such as a chorus. University of Cincinnati College Professor Dr. James Kellaris conducted a survey with thousands of respondents, according to which about 98% of participants experienced this feeling at least once in their life, and most of them (73.7%) said that they tend to be attached to them. songs, that is, songs that have lyrics. Slightly over 18% attribute this feeling to music from advertisements and radio jingles, and only 7% named instrumental compositions.
The nature of obsessive melodies is phenomenological. First of all, they are the subjective experience of the listener. In addition, the image of a melody, which is repeated over and over again in memory, is separated from auditory perception: it is considered not as a melody itself, but as a memory of it. Finally, the intrusive melody can be associated with motor activity: the participants in one of the experiments reproduced the tempo of the sticky motives with high accuracy. Another study shows that motor involvement in listening to a song - dancing, tapping out a rhythm, singing a melody - contributes to further jamming of the song.
It is necessary to distinguish "worms" from musical hallucinations, which can occur with schizophrenia, alcoholism, taking psychotropic substances or epilepsy. Most often, the corrosive melody is spinning in the head for no more than one day. There are cases when people reported that they had music in their heads all the time. However, it is unclear whether such cases can be classified as manifestations of the melody effect.
Researchers name a variety of prerequisites that lead to jamming of a variety of melodies. Among them there is a listener's musicality in one form or another: both the presence of a musical education and an active interest in music. Another factor is a predisposition to hallucinatory experiences, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts.
In addition, psychologists are researching which songs are linked most often. An attempt to determine the musical characteristics due to which the composition becomes sticky showed that the "worms" have a rather fast pace, and the pitch rises and falls used in them are more in line with the well-established Western musical tradition: for example , Deep Purple - Smoke on the Water turned out to be more clingy than Muse - Plug in Baby... Other acoustic characteristics such as timbre and loudness, as well as other abstract features of songs, such as lyrical content, were not studied in this study. Another important factor is the novelty of the composition for the listener: recently heard songs are much easier to attach than familiar ones. If we consider stuck melodies as musical memories, this makes sense: objects that are relatively new to the individual, in particular auditory ones, are much easier to remember. In addition, the conditions under which a person listened to the composition matter. This illustrates the effect of von Restorf's isolation: the only jazz instrumental composition among country ballads will be remembered more easily than any of the ballads, and the listener will distinguish it even from other jazz compositions.
Under some circumstances, a song can come to mind spontaneously without listening to it first. It can be caused by specific mnemonic associations or memory signals, affective states and states of attention, as well as in situations of especially high or especially low cognitive load. In situations like this, unfocused thought processes arise that can stimulate random, unintentional musical memories.
In the situation of reproducing a musical memory, an emotional assessment of this process is important. If a person treats the composition neutrally, it will not be remembered, that is, the individual will neither encourage nor reject this experience. But if he begins to reflect on the melody, like any memory, it will be reactivated and will begin to play in the future. If the repetition of the melody annoys the person, this will shift his attitude towards the song towards a negative assessment, but if the repetition is pleasant, then the emotional reaction will be positive.
How to get rid of an intrusive melody? At first glance, this is very difficult. The situation when a person forces himself not to think is reflected in Daniel Wegner's experiment. The scientist gathered volunteer students and divided them into two groups: he gave one of them the task to think about a polar bear, while the other group was forbidden to think about a polar bear. The more the participants in the second group tried not to think about the animal, the more they thought about it. Trying to control the thought process, especially under stress or outside interference, made the forbidden thought especially intrusive. In any case, sooner or later the melody itself will stop playing in the head. But there are several strategies to help the brain switch.
One is looking for distractions like another song, poem, or movie. Philip Beeman suggested another strategy. He suggests that the fact that compositions with texts are attached more often than instrumental ones may indicate that the arising auditory images are supported by subvocalization - mental articulation. Chewing gum can prevent this: as Beeman's experiments have shown, chewing gum interferes with pronunciation, and mental repetition of melodies decreases regardless of whether you make an effort not to think about the song or not. You can tap the rhythm of another melody, but this is not as effective.
