Have you guys ever had a specific yet extremely random song that would continuously loop in your head while doing everyday tasks? 

Figure 1: My constant repeats from an artist, Bruno Major

Well, me too! Spotify has told me in the past about which artists I have looped the most, as shown here. Whether I’m folding my laundry or even just walking from class to class, my brain itches to replay and replay the song that has been running around my mind. And thus, I end up listening to the same 14 songs from my “On Repeat” playlist for several months. 

The state of having a song constantly stuck in your head actually has been termed by scientists: an “earworm”. An earworm works through involuntary musical imagery (INMI), a term that suggests the automatic habit in recalling musical tunes in one’s mind without any effort. This phenomenon has several reasons, the first one due to our memory systems and its recognition of patterns and repetition. Also called the phonological loop, the primary auditory complex has a working memory component that catches repetitive or catchy parts of a song, such as the chorus, into the loop especially after our brain has recognized and desired to express a catchy phrase. It sort of acts like a recording tape, wanting to recall and attune into the intriguing and memorable part of a song. Moreover, a study from Liikkanen has shown the continuation of engagement towards a certain song due to activity in the left primary auditory complex.

Figure 2: Auditory cortex in activation during silent gaps in music

MRI brain scans shown in figure 2 portray remaining activity in the auditory cortex despite no music playing. Typically, this region is activated when physically listening to a song, yet activity pertains when participants imagine a song or fill in gaps of a song that did not finish playing. This ultimately suggests the ability of our brains to loop and replay songs without any external stimuli to force the looping of music. As a matter of fact, there is a term called the “Zeigarnik Effect” that explains the urge in humans to better remember incomplete or unfinished tasks instead of completed tasks. 

Therefore you might not remember, but there may be times when you previously skipped a song or took out your AirPods in the middle of another song. Later on, you would then have a song constantly looping in your mind, due to either the working memory being notified of the most recent chorus or due to the Zeigarnik Effect in which you have tendencies to remember what was unfinished. This made a lot of sense to me, as I remember my friend showing me her listening to a four hour long video of one song just being repeated. She told me this was her remedy to getting songs stuck out of her head as it lets her brain complete the task in fulfilling the entire song.

In the future, I wonder if you guys will become more cognizant of the times you have certain choruses or phrases of a song stuck in your head. Maybe you can try an eight hour playlist of that song to remove that internal loop of yours!

Sources

Liikkanen LA, Jakubowski K. 2020. Involuntary musical imagery as a component of ordinary music cognition: A review of empirical evidence. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 27(6):1195–1217. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01750-7. [accessed 2025 Apr 17].

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