It’s bad enough getting a song stuck in your head when it’s music you like, but now that I’m a parent?
Try getting songs by Blippi or “It’s Raining Tacos” jammed in there for days on end.
Yes, I speak from experience.
So, it is more than welcome news to find some advice out there on how to eject an unwanted song from your brain once you’ve had enough.
It turns out that music psychologist Dr. Kelly Jakubowski from Durham University got together with Atlassian to create a track called “Earworm Eraser.”
She says the track is “scientifically engineered and designed to get rid of earworms for good.”
You might be curious, though, how we get songs stuck on a loop in there in the first place.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, said in a TED-Ed video that 90% of people end up with an earworm every week.
And 25% of the population can get them several times a day.
Earworms are a form of auditory imagery – those are sounds stored in our heads that we can thinking of when imagining. It gets suck on a loop, and the more we listen to it, the harder it is to dislodge.
Without knowing exactly why we get them it can be hard to ask science for a cure, but Atlassian says the key to its success could also be a key to its downfall.
“The Earworm Eraser audio track works by incorporating scientific principles of music and the brain to disrupt the neural patterns that keep a catchy tune stuck in one’s head. The track features a series of audio patterns and rhythmic structures that are carefully designed to break the loop of the song in the listener’s head.”
You’ll have to give it a try and see if it works.
I’m sure it won’t be long until another earworm gives you the perfect opportunity.
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