Have you ever been infected by an earworm?

TORONTO - Some 98 to 99 percent of the population has, at some point, been “infected” with a song they just can’t seem to shake off. Researchers in Canada have sought to examine the phenomenon.

This common phenomenon had rarely been researched until Andréane McNally-Gagnon, doctoral student in psychology, University of Montreal (UM), decided to examine the issue in an ongoing investigation.

In most cases, earworms (songs, jingles, and tunes that get stuck inside your head) disappear after a few minutes.

In some cases, earworms can last hours or even days. McNally-Gagnon is also a musician, who is often infected, which is why she wanted to better understand how and why it occurs.

For starters, she asked French-speaking internet users to rank 100 pop songs according to their ability to be compulsively repeated within one’s mind.

The top five were: ‘Singing in the Rain’ (Gene Kelly), ‘Live Is Life’ (Opus), ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ (Bobby McFerrin), ‘I Will Survive’ (Gloria Gaynor) and, in first place, ‘Ça fait rire les oiseaux’ by Caribbean sensation La Compagnie Créole.

In the lab, McNally-Gagnon and her thesis director Sylvie Hébert, professor at the UM School of Speech Therapy and Audiology, asked musicians and non-musicians to hum and record their obsessive songs and note their emotional state before and after.

The researchers found earworm infections last longer with musicians than with non-musicians.

The phenomenon occurs when subjects are usually in a positive emotional state and keeping busy with non-intellectual activities such as walking, which requires little concentration.

“Perhaps the phenomenon occurs to prevent brooding or to change moods,” says Hébert.

The study also revealed that auditive memory in people can accurately replicate songs.

Humming among musicians was only one key off original recordings, while non-musicians were off by two keys.

McNally-Gagnon and Hébert now plan to study earworms using MRI or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation technology, said a UM release.

“The only such studies that have been conducted were on test subjects who mentally imagined a song,” says Hébert. “We believe the neurological process is different with earworms, because the phenomenon is involuntary.”

These findings were published in Molecular Endocrinology.