Thursday 23 July 2015

The Architecture of an Earworm-Infected Brain

Earworms. Love them or hate them we all get them; but some of us get them more than others and can get rid of them more easily than others. A new open access paper in Consciousness and Cognition is the first to ever look at brain structure in relation to the phenomenon. They asked 44 people to fill in a questionnaire to find details like frequency, duration, how it makes them feel, how it affected their concentration and, of course, what the tune is. They ascertained their musical abilities, too, to see if those of us that can play instruments or sing well are affected differently. They also conducted MRI scans of their brains to try to find differences in their brain structure that might account for whatever they found.

People who could play instruments or performed music were, indeed, more likely to suffer an earworm, and the scans revealed that areas of the brain responsible for pitch discrimination and auditory perception had thicker cortices in people who had more frequent earworms. People who found earworms very annoying tended to have more grey matter in the emotional-related temporal pole. There's no suggestion that these differences are directly causing the earworms, that would need a lot more further study. One thing has become clear over multiple studies, though, and that is that an idle brain that isn't doing anything is far more likely to be infected. If you don't want that annoying tune stuck in your head then keep yourselves busy.

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