Earworms

When I see this term, the first thing I think of is that scene from Star Trek II. 



Fortunately, thinking of Walter Koenig screaming is more disturbing than the idea of a song rattling around in my mind, so I'm not overly concerned by the real earworms.  There is an article in BBC News Magazine, written by Rhitu Chatterjee, talking about recent research on earworms.  Vicky Williams talks of involuntary memory, and has found suggestions that stress is a triggering factor in causing earworms.  Dan Levitin says we might have evolved with the ability to remember music well, since humans could well have used music to encode information before language developed.  The article doesn't mention that music is unique in stimulating large swathes of the brain, more than perceiving language. Thus it has more of a chance of being stored in memory, because of the redundancies involved in perception.  


 

My guess would be that most earworms involve a high level of repetition within the musical structure.  So just as Mozart was able to transcribe Allegri's Miserere after one hearing, because the subject is repeated so many times, and because the structure is so clear, an earworm song is (too) easy to remember because of the repetitive nature.