I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour but heaven knows I’m miserable now
Sometimes songs get ’stuck in our head’. In German, this experience is known as having an ‘earworm’ and a new study shortly to be published in the British Journal of Psychology surveyed the typical features of this common phenomenon.
What particularly struck me was that “the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity”.
What is meant by auditory memory here is our ability to consciously remember a short piece of sound or to ‘repeat something back to ourselves’ - often called the ‘phonological loop’ in a popular model of working memory.
This tells us that ‘earworms’ are probably not something getting stuck in our very short-term memory but the reason why such tunes keeping buzzing around our conscious mind is still a mystery.
artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, The Melody Haunts My Reverie, 1965 }
