Researcher studies ‘earworms’ for insight into brain

Andréane McNally-Gagnon wants to put earworms in other people’s heads, earworms that belt it out like Gloria Gaynor or croon like French pop stars.
“Yeah, I know that’s mean,” the PhD candidate at the University of Montreal says with a light laugh. “But the point of doing that is to be able to study it, with MRI or some other kind of imaging technique, to see what’s happening in the brain.”
McNally-Gagnon is in her second year of her PhD in neuropsychology and studying the old phenomenon of getting a song stuck in one’s head. She suspects earworms may do more than stimulate auditory regions in the brain — they may also light up regions similar to those activated by people with pathologies like obsessive-compulsive disorder.

If that’s the case, earworms might one day give researchers new insight into disorders.

The term “earworm” was popularized by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris, who started researching the phenomenon of unwelcomed songs that play on repeat in one’s brain in 2000.

Earworms are widespread, with 98 to 99 per cent of the population catching a musical bug at some point. McNally-Gagnon says most people have them every day or every week.

For her, the subject was a marriage of her two favourite things, psychology and music. When she isn’t studying the brain, she plays violin and sings in a choir.

In an early study, she asked French-speakers to rank 100 pop songs according to their ability to be compulsively repeated. The winner was “Ça fait rire les oiseaux” by Caribbean pop band La Compagnie Créole, with Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” in second and third place.

Next, she and thesis director Sylvie Hébert, professor at the University of Montreal school of speech therapy and audiology, asked 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians to carry recording devices and sing the catchy tunes that were playing in their heads throughout the day.

While the musicians did not have more earworms than the non-musicians, they had more difficulty getting rid of the songs than the non-musicians. Both groups were skilled at replicating songs in terms of speed, pitch and key.

They also reported getting the songs stuck when they were in a good mood and busying themselves with non-intellectual activities such as walking.

“There’s a strong link between music and mood, of course,” says McNally-Gagnon. “Usually when we listen to music it makes us happy.”

The researchers, working at the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, were also successful an inducing earworms in about half of the participants — that is, intentionally infecting them with specific songs. McNally-Gagnon hopes to be able to do this with higher success rates in subsequent studies that will also involve examining the brain with magnetic resonance imaging or transcranial magnetic imaging.

McNally-Gagnon says her peskiest earworm at the moment is Stromae’s “Alors en danse,” a “very annoying” pop song that is often on the radio in Montreal. But she is also aware of a certain occupational hazard.

“When I started doing the study I always had all the participant songs on my head,” she says — a problem that is only likely to continue.