Why Does Music Get Stuck in Your Head?

A song gets stuck in your head and the first thing you notice is that you can’t find the exit.

It loops. The same eight bars. The same melodic turn at the end that feeds back into the beginning. Maybe it started because you heard it on the radio this morning. Maybe you saw a commercial. Maybe someone hummed it in the elevator and now it’s been four hours and you’re in a meeting and it’s still there, running behind everything else like a process you can’t quit.

Psychologists call this involuntary musical imagery — INMI. The colloquial term is earworm, from the German Ohrwurm. About 98% of people experience them. For roughly a third of people, they happen daily.

This is not a minor quirk. It’s a window into how your brain handles music — which turns out to be one of the strangest things your brain does at all.

The Research

The person who first studied earworms seriously was James Kellaris, a marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati, who coined the term in English around 2003. His surveys found that almost no one is immune — though musicians get them more often, and people who are anxious or tired are more susceptible.

Later researchers mapped which songs get stuck most reliably. Kate Jakubowski and colleagues at Durham University identified three structural features that make a song earworm-prone:

A simple, repetitive melodic contour. Not complex — looping. The melody rises and falls in a pattern your brain can predict, then keeps confirming that prediction. “Happy,” “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Bad Romance,” “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” (which is almost too on-the-nose). The structure of these melodies is almost childlike — nursery rhyme simple.

An unexpected melodic interval. Despite the simplicity, earworm songs usually have one moment of surprise — a note that’s slightly higher or lower than expected. Your brain notices the deviation, finds it interesting, and wants to resolve it. When the loop repeats, you get to experience that moment of resolution again. And again. And again.

A faster-than-average tempo. Not frantic, but brisk. Energetic enough to feel propulsive. The melody wants to move forward.

Put these together — predictable loop, one small surprise, fast tempo — and you’ve built a hook your brain will happily replay for hours.

Why Your Brain Does This

The honest answer is that your auditory cortex is extremely good at simulating sound, and it doesn’t always need the sound to be present to run the simulation.

When you listen to music, your auditory cortex activates. But here’s the strange part: imagining music activates the same regions. When you hear a song in your head, your brain is generating a real auditory experience — not as vivid as the actual sound, but using the same neural machinery. Your auditory cortex is essentially playing the song back from memory.

It does this voluntarily when you’re trying to remember a melody. It does it involuntarily — which is the earworm situation — because something in your environment triggered the memory and the playback started before your conscious attention could redirect it.

The trigger can be almost anything. A word that rhymes with a lyric. A rhythm that matches the song’s tempo. Returning to a location where you last heard it. Your brain has indexed music deeply and retrieves it in response to partial cues.

The Zeigarnik Effect

Here’s the part that makes earworms hard to stop.

Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist who noticed in the 1920s that waiters could remember unpaid orders in detail but forgot them almost immediately after payment. Interrupted tasks persist in memory. Completed tasks fade.

Your brain treats an incomplete musical loop the same way. If you hear a song but don’t hear it through to a satisfying resolution — the song ended on the radio before the chorus, or you left the grocery store mid-verse — your brain flags the loop as unfinished. It keeps it active, running in the background, looking for an opportunity to complete it.

This is why earworms are worse when you only catch part of a song. And why they tend to land on a specific phrase — usually the catchiest, most distinctive part — and repeat it endlessly rather than playing the whole song through.

The loop is unresolved. Your brain is waiting to finish it.

What You Can Do About It

This is where the research gets counterintuitive.

The instinct is to suppress — to consciously try not to think about the song. This is almost always counterproductive. Daniel Wegner’s ironic process theory (the same research behind why “don’t think about a pink elephant” doesn’t work) applies here: trying not to think about something requires monitoring for that thing, which activates it. Suppression makes earworms worse.

There are three strategies that actually have research support:

Engage with the song to completion. Listen to the full track, or sing it through to the end. Give your brain the resolution it’s been waiting for. The Zeigarnik loop closes. For many people, this works immediately.

Replace it with a “cure song.” Some songs are better at displacing earworms than others — typically because they’re themselves sticky but slightly more pleasant, and they override the previous loop. “Happy Birthday to You” is a documented earworm antidote, possibly because its melodic structure is so strong that it takes over. The risk, of course, is getting “Happy Birthday” stuck instead.

Do something cognitively engaging. Earworms tend to emerge when your conscious attention is underoccupied — commuting, doing dishes, waiting in line. The background process fills the space. When you force your working memory to focus on something genuinely demanding — a puzzle, reading, a conversation that requires real thought — the earworm drops out of the foreground. It doesn’t always disappear, but it fades.

What This Reveals

There’s something worth sitting with here.

Your brain has a dedicated system for music. Not just for hearing it in real time — for storing it, retrieving it, simulating it, and playing it back internally without your conscious permission. Music is encoded differently than almost any other kind of memory. People with severe amnesia who can’t remember their own family members can still remember songs from childhood. Patients with dementia who have lost most of their declarative memory will recognize and respond to music they loved decades ago.

Your auditory cortex doesn’t just process music. It holds it. It carries it. It runs it back to you unbidden, in moments of silence, in moments of distraction, sometimes in the middle of the night.

An earworm is annoying. But underneath the annoyance is something stranger: evidence that your brain is doing something continuous and active with music even when you’re not listening. Even when you didn’t ask it to. Even when you would really prefer it stopped.

The song that’s stuck in your head right now was always in there.

You just noticed it.