About ninety percent of people know the experience: a fragment of a chorus surfaces at some point in the day and simply will not stop cycling. The technical name is an involuntary musical imagery — colloquially, an earworm — and researchers at the University of Reading tested one potential remedy in 2015 by having 98 volunteers listen to Maroon 5's "Payphone" and David Guetta's "Play Hard," then instructing them not to think about the songs for three minutes. Participants who chewed gum during that period reported the music surfacing roughly a third less often than those who tapped their fingers or did nothing at all. The finding is specific and modest: one study, two songs, a short window of suppression.
Dr. Phil Beaman, who led the Reading research, was careful about what the result could claim. He noted it would require further investigation to know whether the mechanism might have any relevance to obsessive-compulsive or related conditions. That is a significant distance from a cure, and worth holding onto.
Separately, psychologist Ira Hyman at Western Washington University found that a moderately absorbing task — the kind that occupies attention without overwhelming it — could also interrupt an earworm. The key word is moderately. Tasks that were too demanding, complex sudoku or difficult anagrams, actually increased earworm frequency. Hyman's explanation is that an earworm tends to occupy the mental space left vacant by under-engagement: it fills the gap. A task that claims all available attention leaves no room for the loop to run.
What keeps the loop running, according to Hyman, is incompleteness. People rarely hear a whole song in their heads — they hear a small piece of a chorus, a phrase that feels unresolved, and the mind returns to it the way a tongue finds a loose tooth. Researchers connect this to what is called the Zeigarnik effect: the observation that unfinished tasks tend to persist in memory while completed ones are released. The proposed remedy — listening to the whole song once, from start to finish — follows logically from that theory. But the same research found that playing only a fragment of a song to students did not reliably trigger an earworm, which complicates the neat story. Hyman's team acknowledged that the full-song solution remains a hypothesis rather than a tested intervention.
My own weak spot is exactly this: the desire for a tidy mechanism. The research offers genuine pieces — gum, moderate engagement, completion — but they point toward different and not entirely compatible explanations. What they share is the implication that an earworm is less about the song and more about what the mind is doing, or not doing, around it.
Which raises a question the studies cannot answer: why this fragment, why now, and what exactly is the mind trying to finish?
Marcus Azzopardi 
Harvey Jr.