Alanis Morrisette might think that earworms are ironic; they aren’t, they are just annoying.
But its one of those things, in that some might be annoying; others are not. Or at least this exposes the puzzle of earworms: why tunes get stuck in your head, and how they might be exploited?
From a cultural evolutionary psychology perspective, they are likely to have some function implicated in language learning and possibly other things. Ecoute et repete. I get tunes stuck in my head all the time. I’ve noticed though, in trying to learn a different language, that a new phrase will often keep repeating itself. This may be has to do with Associated Sequence Learning, maybe it has the predictive power of knowing one thing usually comes after another in a pattern – if I say “Knock, knock”, then almost automatically the listener will respond “whos there?” This is part of our normalisation and cultural conditioning.
One thing I have noticed in these phrases repeating themselves, is a degree of certainty, a mildly frustrating feeling of whether I am getting it right, or might be mispronouncing something. If I get that sense that I don’t quite have it, then I become motivated to check it out and get it right. Now, the phrase or whatever goes around my head in a more satisfying way until I move onto something else. This corrective motivation could well also be a function of the whatever the neuroanatomy of the earwrom serves.
In its musical incarnation, earworms tend to be annoying. Memetics would have it that auditory parts of the brain might serve to assist with memorising new memes, but they are open to being hijacked by junk memes that are simply super-memorable. I’ve now started to notice the effect of “partial earworms”. For example, part of a song, maybe just a snippet of the chorus, that has clung to my brains. In the instance I’m thinking of, it happens to be a song I like. Whether this liking is down to the artistic merit, production quality, mere exposure, or some simply that it has stuck, is debatable. The effect it is having though is that because only a part is looping in my head, then I seem to be motivated to hear the song, again and again, to fill in the bits maybe. Its the “waiting for my favourite song to come on the radio” phenomenon, it probably gives me a highly reinforcing dopamine blast or something; a form of addiction that radio executives seem to have hardwired knowledge of.
So, it could well be that earworms are those sound patterns that hijack our learning instincts. This feeds into my quest to assemble the perfect earworm, or moreover, the methodology for doing so. That is, to operate upon those learning instincts of mild frustration which motivate the brain to seek the relief and reward of neurotransmitter release.
But it also raises a couple of issues to be addressed in future posts: Is an earworm actually junk from the brains underlying perspective, or is it in someway, deepdown, experienced as valuable? What we might cerebrally think of as a garbage ditty; other parts of the brain might not. In this case an actual junk sound pattern (according to these other parts of the brain) would not become an earworm. Secondly, this earworm project is a research initiative for cliology. Cliology is interested in knowing stuff, but is far more interested in applying that knowledge to obtain some value. Having the magic formula for the perfect earworm might alleviate idle curiosity, but so what? Well, a direct implication is for the pop music industry – how to make a hit. The more generalised principles could be translated to other fads and fashions, but at the widest scope, the cliological implications are those of affecting culture.
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