誰來救救我！@pixabay
“聽我說謝謝你/因為有你/溫暖了四季”“你愛我/我愛你/蜜雪冰城甜蜜蜜”“烏蒙山連著山外山/月光灑下了響水灘”“六星街”“六星街裡還傳來/巴揚琴聲嗎”……現在看到這些歌詞，你的腦海裡會不會不由自主開始迴圈那段熟悉的旋律？一旦響起，是不是就很難把它從腦海中趕走？
人們把這種有時令人感到苦惱卻無計可施的現象稱為 “耳蟲”——某些洗腦的歌曲片段不經意間悄悄爬進了你的耳朵，久久不願離去。
你可能會好奇，為什麼這些歌會“卡”在我們的腦袋裡，或許也想知道，怎樣才能擺脫他們。
首先，雖然目前還沒有相關的大型群體研究證明這一點，但在比較小的範圍內，科學家發現“耳蟲”是一種很常見的現象。在絕大多數情況下，人們的耳蟲會來自一些本來就學過或熟知的歌曲，因此你會對它的旋律記得很清楚。耳蟲也因此成為了一個有趣的視窗，讓科學家得以透過它研究人類音樂記憶的運作機制，比如記憶怎樣自發地向我們呈現這些曲調、它們為什麼會出現在我們的腦海中，以及這一切意味著什麼。
在生活中，你可能須要記住自己的車停在什麼地方、一會去雜貨店買些什麼東西，這些記憶往往是主動且自願的。耳蟲則不然，心理學家稱其為非自願的音樂意象（INMI）。透過耳蟲，我們或許可以對記憶的工作原理產生一些小的見解，比如聯想如何觸發記憶，或情緒如何與記憶相關聯。
說到這裡，你可能會對被動觸發音樂記憶的相關因素感到好奇。心理學家發現，像《蜜雪冰城主題曲》這樣的歌曲之所以容易成為“洗腦神曲”，有幾個關鍵因素。其中之一是簡單重複的旋律結構：歌詞僅有一句“你愛我，我愛你，蜜雪冰城甜蜜蜜”，且以 3.6 秒為週期重複多次，形成無休止的節奏閉環。
為了進一步研究具有哪些特徵的歌曲更容易成為“耳蟲”，心理學家建立了一個時下流行的耳蟲資料庫。英國倫敦大學金史密斯分校（Goldsmiths, University of London）的心理學研究員維多利亞·威廉姆森（Victoria Williamson）和她的同事們用一種非常巧妙的方法做到了這一點：2012 年，他們與英國廣播電視臺（BBC）音樂早餐廣播節目合作，聽眾可以在廣播時段打進電話，告訴主播自己最近的“耳蟲”是哪首歌，並講述它變成“耳蟲”的過程，接著，電臺 DJ 就會播放這首歌曲。
此外，維多利亞還透過一項線上調查收集到了更多人的“耳蟲”體驗。利用這個龐大的資料集，維多利亞構建了一個用於解釋耳蟲來源的理論模型。在她的理論中，非自願音樂意象的觸發因素主要來自四個方面：音樂暴露（最近聽過的某首歌），記憶觸發（各種主題聯想），情緒狀態和低注意力狀態。
例如，當一個人看到一張車牌，上面有一組字母有點像“purple”這個詞，又恰逢下雨，這可能會讓他們聯想到 Prince 的歌曲《Purple Rain》，接著，ta的腦海中就會突然響起這首歌。同樣地，假如你走在街上看到了一家蜜雪冰城，那麼這一整天，你的耳邊可能都會迴盪著“你愛我，我愛你”的魔性旋律。
另外，在維多利亞的模型中，“耳蟲”的觸發按鈕也可能是某種情緒。例如，在研究中，有些受訪者會表示，當自己感到悲傷時，如果某首歌與這種情緒有關，則會使它變成“耳蟲”。
最後一個因素可能有點讓人摸不到頭腦，什麼是低注意力狀態？在一些調查中，當受訪者被問及“耳蟲“出現時正在做什麼時，最常見的答案通常是“沒什麼”。顯然，“沒什麼”也是“耳蟲”出現的答案之一。
當人們處於發呆、走神的狀態，或者正在做一些認知負荷不高，不需要付出太多思考或努力的日常性事務，比如散步時，耳蟲會更容易出現，或是更容易被注意到。所謂“認知負荷”，通俗來說就是“專注”。比如，當你高度專注於做某件事時，這件任務本身就構成了一種“心理負擔”，需要消耗大量的心理資源。在這種高度專注的狀態下，你往往不太會注意到腦海裡正在播放哪首歌。
因此，有些人會在真正需要專注於做某件事時單曲迴圈一些純音樂，這或許可以防止大腦在耳朵裡播放一些會分散注意力的歌曲。如果你只是在胡思亂想，那耳蟲就會趁虛而入，佔據你的大腦。
外界因素只是影響“耳蟲”形成的一方面，歌曲本身的某些音樂特徵也可能使其成為“耳蟲”。
英國達勒姆大學（University of Durham）的心理學家凱利·雅庫博夫斯基（Kelly Jakubowski）是這一領域的主要研究人員之一。她在2017年發表於《美學、創造力和藝術心理學》（Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts）的一項研究中，利用前文維多利亞構建的“耳蟲”資料庫，系統地研究了留在人們腦海中的流行歌曲具備哪些特徵。
結果發現，與一些從未被資料庫標記為“耳蟲”的歌曲相比，經常被人們標記為“耳蟲”歌曲平均節奏更快，整體來看，更容易變成“耳蟲”的歌曲節奏通常約為 124 BPM（每分鐘 124 拍）。這個節奏範圍的有趣之處在於，它與人類自發的首選節奏非常吻合，比如當我們活動或自由跳舞時，節拍通常也是 124 BPM。
此外，“耳蟲”們還具有更常見的整體旋律輪廓，有一定的重複和規律，歌曲旋律轉折點之間的平均梯度則較小。這種規律性會讓我們更容易回憶起這首歌。
有時候，耳蟲在生活中是個無傷大雅的小調劑，但當某首歌已經連續三天在你耳畔縈繞，你希望它儘快離開你的大腦，該怎麼辦？
首先，你可以嘗試將它切換為另一首歌，你可以開始想一首和原來那首歌有關聯，和聲和旋律類似的歌曲，或是一首與之完全不同、但容易成為“耳蟲”的歌曲。
凱利表示，這種方法就像為你的心理收音機切歌，當想象一首你真正喜歡的歌，或者聽其他音樂時，我們很難同時再讓另一首歌停留在腦海裡。這兩件事在人類大腦中使用了非常相似的神經資源，可以有效阻止耳蟲。
Why You Can’t Get That Song Out of Your Head
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
You know that feeling when you just can’t get a song out of your head—just a short part of it playing over and over? Right now my brain is chewing on the Muppet Show theme ’cause I just watched a live-stream charity event where a bunch of my favorite comedians, including some from Dropout, which longtime listeners know I’m a huge fan of, did a onstage reading of The Muppet Show, so right now it’s just, you know, “It’s time to play the music / It’s time to light the lights,” over and over again. So thanks for that, folks.
A lot of people call those annoying little ditties “earworms”: fragments of songs that crawl into your mind and just don’t want to leave. And scientists have actually done quite a bit of research to figure out why some tunes wriggle their way into our heads better than others.
You’ve probably dealt with your own share of earworms. In fact, in a few previous episodes, I asked all of you to send in some of your favorite or most infuriating examples, and a whole bunch of you were kind enough to sing into your phones for us.
Here’s Kerry from New Orleans.
Kerry: I have had this earworn in my head for literally at least 20 years before I go to bed at night—Whitney Houston.
[CLIP: Listener Kerry sings the chorus of “I Want to Dance With Somebody,” by Whitney Houston.]
Feltman: And a listener named John shared this classic.
[CLIP: Listener John sings the chorus of “Wonderwall” by Oasis.]
Feltman: And here’s Jim from Massachusetts.
[CLIP: Listener Jim imitates the music in “Angry Again” by Megadeth.]
Feltman: Why do these songs get stuck in our noggins? And how can we get rid of them? To answer these questions I’m joined today by Scientific American senior editor Josh Fischman, who’s been taking a deep dive into the psychology of earworms.
Hi, Josh!
Josh Fischman: Hi, Rachel. Hey, thanks for having me here.
Feltman: Of course, happy to have you. So do you get earworms?
Fischman: I am incredibly [laughs] prone to earworms. And I’m not musical; I am a failed flute player, and believe me, you really don’t wanna hear me sing. But I always seem to have this musical soundtrack in the back of my head.
Feltman: Can you give me an example?
Fischman: Oh, Rachel—you’re going to be sorry that you asked that.
[CLIP: The introduction of “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede fades in.]
Fischman: That song, of course, is the 1974 hit “Hooked on a Feeling” by the band Blue Swede. And it seems like it’s there for me once or twice every week. And once it’s on it doesn’t go away for days.
Feltman: [Laughs] Yeah, a classic earworm, for sure. And I think, regardless of folks’, you know, musical history or taste, since the first Guardians of the Galaxy came out, I think probably the, the number of people who have that stuck in their head on any given day has gone up exponentially [laughs].
Fischman: Yeah, I—thanks for that movie and, you know, Peter’s mixtape for bringing that back for me, a lot.
Feltman: So one thing I’m curious about is how common earworms actually are.
Fischman: That’s a great question. It doesn’t have a hard-and-fast answer, though, because there’s no one giant, definitive population study. But lots of smaller ones say earworms are, in fact, really common.
I talked about this with Kelly Jakubowski, who’s a psychologist at the University of Durham in England, and she’s one of the leading researchers in this area.
Kelly Jakubowski: The vast majority of times we have earworms, they’re songs that we, you know, we remember well, that we’ve learned and have known before, and so on, and so earworms are a really interesting way to kind of provide sort of everyday insight into the workings of musical memory and how our memories sometimes, often kind of spontaneously, present us with these tunes and why they come to mind and what does it all mean.
Fischman: Now, Kelly says these sneaky little critters may be windows—or tiny microphones—into how memory works.
A lot of memory’s voluntary, right? You try and remember where you parked your car or what you need from the grocery store. But earworms are involuntary; in fact, psychologists call them involuntary musical imagery. So looking at them may produce some insights into how memory works in a small way: where associations trigger memories or how mood is associated with memory.
Feltman: I’m really curious about those triggers. You know, why, for instance, does the “Ooga-Chaka” song keep [laughs] coming back to you?
Fischman: That’s a great question, too [laughs]. I really don’t know for sure. But there are a couple of aspects of that tune that do make it prime earworm material, psychologists have found. One is the tempo and that “Ooga-Chaka” repetition, and I’ll get back to that later.
The other might be word association. The next line after the Ooga-Chakas is: “I can’t stop this feeling.” Now, I report on health, including psychology, so usually the word “feeling” comes up every day in what I read and what I talk about. So it turns out that, according to one recent study, that associations like that are a big earworm trigger.
I talked to another earworm researcher about the way that that works.
Matt Evans: I’m Matt Evans. I’m a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in cognitive psychology.
Fischman: Matt told me that some psychologists figured out a cool way of developing a database of popular earworms.
Evans: Victoria Williamson and a large team of researchers out of Goldsmiths, University of London, had a, a really clever way of finding a really big dataset of people reporting their earworms and where they came from. They realized that there was a BBC radio drive-time show where the DJ would ask people to call in when they had an earworm and tell ’em what their earworm was and why they had it, and then they, the DJ, would play the song.
They were able to use that to generate this sort of theoretical model of where earworms come from, and one of the most common triggers is having heard a song recently, but then various types of thematic association was also, like, a major—you know, someone sees a license plate, and there’s a set of letters in there that sort of looks like the word “purple,” and it’s raining, and that makes them think of “Purple Rain,” and suddenly they have Prince stuck in their head.
[CLIP: “Purple Rain” by Prince]
Fischman: So maybe that jibes with my experience. Actually, I mentioned the “Ooga-Chakas” song to Matt, and he said …
Evans: That’s gonna be stuck in my head now.
Feltman: Yeah, I have to admit that when I looked at your outline to get ready for this episode and I saw that you were gonna mention that song, I was like, “Oh, no, I’m cooked [laughs]; it’s gonna be ‘Ookga-Chaka’ all day for me [laughs].”
Fischman: Oh, sorry!
Feltman: I mean, you know, who among us could possibly stop that feeling?
Fischman: I’m high on believing that, Rachel.
Matt went on to say that that’s not the only kind of trigger.
Evans: Being in a certain mood could be a trigger for a certain earworm. A person would report that they were feeling sad, for example, and that feeling of sadness they associated with a certain song, and that song got stuck in their head.
Feltman: Okay, so just a pause to do a tally of triggers here. So far we have three: There’s having heard a song recently, which, of course, makes sense. Then there’s also an association with something nonmusical you see or hear. And then there’s your mood, like sadness or happiness. Are there any more triggers we know about?
Fischman: Well, some surveys have asked people what they were doing when an earworm turned up. One of the most common answers is: “Nothing much.” And Nick Davidenko, a psychologist at UC Santa Cruz who studies perception and memory—and who works with Matt—talked with me about this.
Nick Davidenko: Mind wandering or, like, taking a walk or—there’s a certain kind of daily things that seem to maybe not involve too much cognitive load or too much thought or effort where earworms are more likely to sort of come up or maybe more likely to be noticed.
Fischman: So what Nick means by cognitive load is what you and I might call focus, Rachel. So if you’re concentrating hard on something—I don’t know, for me, that might be rewiring an electrical outlet on my house, which makes me nervous; that’s almost literally a load on my mind. It takes a lot of …
Feltman: Mm.
Fischman: Mental resources. That’s a situation where I don’t hear music in my head.
Feltman: See, I’m the kind of freak who hears, like, “The Final Countdown” when I’m doing something stressful. Just [imitates the beginning of “The Final Countdown” by Europe].
But I do get what you mean [laughs] ’cause when I really need to knuckle down and focus on something, I actually tend to put on really repetitive instrumental music, specifically to keep my internal radio from turning on and distracting me, so it makes sense that the opposite situation—where you’re kind of just mentally meandering or ruminating on something—is, like, prime time for earworms. You know, our minds are free to latch on to things, including songs we’ve maybe heard throughout the day.
Fischman: Yeah, exactly, and it’s not just outside influences—Kelly points out that certain musical features of the song itself can make it particularly earworm-worthy.
Jakubowski: I worked on a study that we published a few years ago, back in 2017, where we looked at the features specifically of pop songs that get stuck in people’s heads. And we found that songs that are at a certain tempo range are sort of more likely to get stuck with people.
Basically, we looked at pop songs that were really frequently named as earworms in a big survey compared to comparable pop songs that had never been named as earworms even once in this big survey. We found that earworm songs tended to be faster in tempo than the non-earworm songs. These tended to be around sort of 124 beats per minute as a sort of average tempo; obviously there was some range around that.
Something interesting about that tempo range is that it kind of aligns quite well with what we call the sort of spontaneous preferred tempo for humans.
Fischman: Basically, Kelly says, that’s the speed that we kind of like to move at or to dance at.
Feltman: That’s cool. Listeners, if you don’t have a great reference point for BPMs, that’s about two beats per second, which is, like, pretty snappy.
Jakubowski: Music that is at that speed seems to get stuck in our heads more often. It seems like there is this kind of inherent link between our sort of body rhythms and the rhythms of the music in our head and so on.
Fischman: Now, remember, she said around 124 beats, so there’s a lot of variation, but the big takeaway, just like you said, was that up-tempo songs get named as earworms by more people, like this one.
[CLIP: “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga]
Feltman: That’s Lady Gaga, of course, with “Bad Romance,” a frequent earworm resident [laughs] for me.
Fischman: Yeah, and it was a huge hit, too. And she’s very close to 124 beats per minute there. But her chorus also shows another very earwormy feature: the melody of it rises and falls in a regular pattern—it goes up, and it goes down. Kelly says that regularity may help us recall the song more easily.
Feltman: Totally, yeah, I mean that little hook with the “ooh la las” and whatever—there’s a lot of stuff in that song that seems really primed to get stuck in at least my head.
So what do I do if that song is in my brain for the next three days and, as much as I love Lady Gaga, I want it gone?
Fischman: Yeah, totally hear you. So earworm control is such an interesting area. Actually, all the scientists I spoke with pointed out that in surveys, most people say they like their earworms; only about a third say they’re bothered by them.
Feltman: Okay, so why do we tend to talk about them in such a negative light? I mean, you rarely hear someone say, “Oh, I’ve got this cool song in my head today, and that’s so great.”
Fischman: Yeah, like, I’m much more likely to say, “I can’t get this stupid song to stop.” Psychologists say that that’s probably a type of cognitive bias.
Feltman: Mm.
Fischman: We’re more likely to pay attention to negative experiences, things that irritate us, so we react to the bad earworms and the good ones happily play in the background, giving us a bit of joy when we stop and notice them.
Feltman: Yeah, I, I buy that. But if I do have a bad one, what can I do about it?
Fischman: I went back to Nick Davidenko for that one. Nick has a interesting perspective on this because he always has an earworm.
Davidenko: Yeah, it’s true. As far as I can remember, even as, as a kid, I rarely experience moment of where there is no music in my head, unless I’m actively talking, for example.
It’s a little bit random: it can be popular music, less often classical music but jazz, kind of genre of music that I listen to or that I like or that I play is a candidate—or even music I don’t like or, you know, theme song from a TV show or a commercial.
Feltman: Oh, wow. I’m not quite at that level, but I do hear music in my head more often than not, and I’ve honestly never stopped to think about how normal that is, and it’s usually benign or even enjoyable, but there are definitely times when it gets annoying. So what does Nick do to make it stop?
Davidenko: At some point try to jump on to another song. So it could be a related song, harmonically or melodically, or it could be a completely different song, but it helps to be another song that can get stuck in my head.
So it, it’s a trade-off, right? If you’re finding yourself kind of tired of having a specific song, I have to trade it for another song, so I might as well trade it for something that’s gonna be different enough and, and sort of strike a different part of my brain than whatever song that was.
Fischman: And Kelly endorsed that idea.
Jakubowski: Like, switch your mental radio—so imagine a song that you really do like or listen to some other music. It’s very, very hard to listen to music and have a song stuck in your head at the same time; those two things use very similar neural resources in our brain, so imagining music essentially uses very similar capacities to hearing music, so it’s pretty effective to block out an earworm.
Fischman: There’s one final strategy sussed out by some scientists at the University of Reading in England…[full transcript]
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