Often when I wake up I start singing the song Sing Hosanna! I was reminded of this on Sunday when I heard the song on a comedy show on the radio.
Most of the time I merely mouth it in a whisper as it runs through my head, or else I hum it or whistle it. I said that I start singing when I wake up, but I’m usually already singing it before I become aware of it and before I’m fully awake. It goes back to my days at Sunday School when I was about 10 years old, and it’s been happening on and off since then.
Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising,
Give me joy in my heart, I pray,
Give me joy in my heart, keep me praising,
Keep me praising ’till the break of day.
Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
Sing hosanna to the King of kings!
Sing hosanna, sing hosanna,
Sing hosanna to the King.
Give me peace in my heart, keep me praying,
Give me peace in my heart, I pray,
Give me peace in my heart, keep me praying,
Keep me praying ’till the end of day.
A local character called Dave Clark would come by with his guitar to lead the sing-song, which was the culmination of the session.
What is the psychology of this intrusive, recurring tune in my head? Perhaps it’s just the ultimate catchy song, and because I heard it and sang it, week after week, at a formative time in my mental development, it became a part of me. The melody is irritatingly childlike, with a kind of mindless, uninvolving jumpiness. It has this in common with many songs that I “can’t get out of my head”. I suppose it’s the same for other people.
It turns out that the Germans have a word for this. I have an ohrwurm – an earworm.
Songs such as the Village People’s YMCA, Los Del Rio’s Macarena, and the Baha Men’s Who Let The Dogs Out owe their success to their ability to create a “cognitive itch,” according to Professor James Kellaris, of the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration.
“Certain songs have properties that are analogous to histamines that make our brain itch.”
“The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending melody in our minds.”
(BBC News)
The simplest tunes – the easiest tunes to assimilate – are the ones that become earworms. Some say that listening to a tune in its entirety will make it go away. Mozart’s children would play on the piano below his room, and when they played incomplete scales he was compelled to rush down and complete them. So perhaps I need to seek out a performance of this song, or simply sing it myself in full.
Some think that the mind gets stuck in a phonological loop, which rehearses verbal information in a constant loop to prevent the decay of the information in storage. According to this theory, the best thing to do to get rid of the tune is to distract yourself so that natural decay can take place.
That doesn’t take account of my condition, in which it just keeps coming back no matter what I do, over a period – so far – of about twenty-five years. In fact, researchers seem to be unaware that this can happen. Here’s a definitive-sounding answer to the question How long am I likely to be infected with an earworm?
“An earworm episode can last anywhere from a few minutes to many days. Most people report episodes lasting from a few hours to an entire day; however, episodes lasting over a week are not uncommon.”
(Earworm FAQ page)
So what about brain science? I found a Guardian report, and this Science Daily report, from last year. They report on a study by researchers at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, called Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex, published in the March 10, 2006 issue of Nature.
‘”We found,” says David Kraemer, a graduate student of cognitive science and the lead researcher on the Dartmouth study, “that the auditory cortex that is active when you’re actually listening to a song was reactivated when you just imagine hearing the song.”‘
And the auditory cortex keeps on singing when the sound stops. So a part of the brain that was thought only to handle sound perception actually reproduces its “normal” activity when there is no sound stimulus at all. It is “perception in reverse”.
But again, we find no mention of chronic earworms:
“Treated earworms go away in one day, untreated earworms in 24 hours.”
It seems that none of the scientists and researchers who are studying the phenomenon have encountered people, like me, with extremely long-lived earworms. And because mine is a special case, it will require a special cure. I do have the normal run-of-the-mill earworms as well, and I’m well aware that they can be got rid of through a mental effort, or with a replacement earworm. But what’s gonna shift this horrible hymn? On one site it says that lobotomy is known to work, but that it’s ill-advised because of the possible side-effects. I’ll say!
Well, it’s not the hottest area of psychological, let alone neurological, study at the moment, so all the unanswered questions will have to remain unanswered for quite a while I think. Here are some more links:
http://www.business.uc.edu/earworms/research
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=earworm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/health/psychology/12musi.html?ex=1278820800&en=6ad31758c7334d06&ei=5090&partner=rss
http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/03/why_you_cant_ge.html
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=499811
http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/09/05/levitin/
http://philosophy.tamucc.edu/article.pl?sid=06/09/05/1219247&mode=thread
Actually, this tune occasionally haunts me too, but with lyrics retrofitted by school-children.
They are crudely sexual, but have a certain charm:
Get your jaws around my baws, geez a gobble
Get your jaws around my baws, I pray
Get your jaws around my baws, geez a gobble
Keep on gobbling til the end of day
An earworm can become an obvious annoyance so i hope you have come to love yours bro. andrewmu’s lyrics may give you some variation.
The annoyance can spread to other people however. Many years ago there was a period of roughly 2 months where you subjected me to your humming, whistling and singing (which occasionally involved a clapping accompaniment) to Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. It still haunts me to this day. It has become a rare earworm for me but when it rears it’s ugly head i have the added association with you performing the song. I only mention this to you as i feel safe in the knowledge that you are many miles away and i will not be seeing you for a good few weeks. Mentioning it many ignite your Manilow lust once more which will have hopefully subsided by the next time we see each other. Initially i thought reminding you about it may be some sort of revenge for me by giving you an old earworm back. I remember, however, that the song never seemed to annoy you so i’ve probably just made your day.
Barry Manilow’s Copacabana is actually much better than Stravinsky’s later period.
Yours,
Boris Bone
Interesting stuff.
I thought “could this new lewd version of Sing Hosanna supplant my old one”, but then I realized that earworms are about the music, seemingly disconnected from the words. I wonder if other people’s earworm experiences confirm this as a general rule? But thanks andrewmu, it was very entertaining and I’ve been singing it to fill in awkward gaps in conversations over the last couple of days.
Stu, I remember it well and, come to think of it, it’s another chronic earworm of mine, though much milder than Sing Hosanna. And from what you say it sounds like it’s the same for you. But I think we need to define exactly what a chronic earworm is, because I wouldn’t want to over-diagnose.
I do have to take issue with your description of my condition as “Manilow lust”. This is very misleading and ignores the involuntary nature of earworms.
Hi Boris, I like your pronouncement that Copacabana is actually better than Stravinsky’s later period. This suggests that you have discovered hard evidence. Is this true?
[...] an earworm, which is the catchy song that you can’t get out of your head (which I’ve written about before in this blog), but what you might call a language worm. Every so often this phrase pops into my [...]