What's on your brain jukebox?

Video: The author demonstrating her affliction.

This morning, as I attended to my ablutions in the bathroom, I burst into song: the theme from The Moomins, a Finnish kids’ TV show, aired in the UK between 1983 and 1985. I fell back into silence, but a few minutes later my treacherous lungs launched into the chorus of ‘Ferry Across the Mersey’, the 1989 cover version, in aid of the Hillsborough disaster. From the bedroom, Frank joined in. Sweet.

For both of us, obeying our brain radios is automatic and involuntary. One of us will constantly trigger the other, locked in our earworm echochamber. We rarely play music in the house; we don’t need to.

As we drove to the beach, I burst into ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’; the Bill Medley version that appeared on the soundtrack of Rambo III in 1988. Most of my earworms are from the 1980s – my formative years. Having said that, System of a Down’s ‘Chop Suey!’ was next out the gates and that’s from 2001. When we parked and got out to walk, Frank countered with Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ and, five minutes later, ‘El Condor Pasa (If I Could)’. I was obliged to join him.

Harvard scientist David Silbersweig links earworms to the way memory and attention work for some of us:

There’s involvement of the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain that supports musical perception, and connections between that cortex and deep temporal-lobe areas, like the hippocampus or parahippocampal gyrus, that are important in memory encoding and retrieval. The phonological loop has been implicated — the process of holding something in your mind, like a mental scratchpad, for a certain number of seconds. So there are networks in the brain that support these functions of music — and memory, and attention, and keeping something in your head, and working memory. And then there’s the connection to the emotional regions of the brain, like the amygdala, which is involved in salience and negative emotion, and the ventral striatum, or nucleus accumbens, which is involved with positive emotion and reward. These are all elements that are thought to be involved in earworms.

What happens is that connections in our brains involving these regions get “stuck,” resulting in an automatic playing out of musical memories.

Professor Silbersweig suggests that people with OCD may experience this more than others, particularly if there’s a song on a loop. Other studies examine a link between people with ADHD and earworms, which is put down to a combination of a novelty-seeking brain desiring stimulation and an ability to filter out unbidden thoughts because of sensory processing issues.

Certainly neurodivergent people can experience ‘echolalia’, whereby they mimic sounds they hear. Here’s a guy tricking his ADHD girlfriend and autistic son into seeing who mimics his funny little noises more. And okay, it’s scripted, but it’s based on their life:

For me, the selection isn’t always random.

• A snippet of bird song outside might echo the first few notes of a pop song’s refrain and cause me to pick up the thread.

• The cluster of musical notes my car plays when I turn on the engine without fail has me turning it into the jingle from 80s UK gameshow Blockbusters.

• ‘He Ain’t Heavy’ this morning was triggered by the road I was driving on having chicanes (“the road is long, with many a winding turn”).

• If I’m listening to a conversation or podcast, a snippet of a phrase will inspire a burst of song if it contains words also found in lyrics. I don’t dare ever visit Vienna, thanks to Midge Ure.

Sometimes this brain-radio condition feels a bit like Tourette’s: such as when I explode with “Not one, not two, but three chocolatey biscuits” and then lapse into silence again. Other times, earworms have no mercy, like when Frank and I were in Berlin at Christmas and one or the other of us would keep launching into ‘Fairytale of New York’ over the course of two weeks, to the point that we established a forfeit – the next one to crack having to buy the other their next meal.

Generally speaking, though, I’m super happy to have found a partner who loves CATS, West Side Story and 1980s pop as much as me. Hearing his little falsetto join in from the next room is another form of connection.

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