You’ve likely experienced it at one time or another, a song stuck in your head that you just can’t seem to get rid of. These so called “earworms” (Granted, not the most flattering of names.) have plagued mankind since the dawn of catchy tunes, or at least since your last run-in with “It’s a Small World After All” at Disneyland. In 1845, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that it is “quite a common thing” to be “annoyed” or “tormented” by “the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song.”

However, a new study in England suggests that if you want to get an annoying song out of your head, chewing a piece of gum might help. It turns out that just the mechanical act of moving one’s jaw up and down can reduce the number of times people think about a catchy song, as well as how often they “hear” that song playing in their minds. According to Dr. Philip Beaman, lead researcher for the study, this phenomenon of getting a song stuck in your head “may be a form of involuntary musical memory”.

The study found that the act of chewing gum actually interferes with the recollections of music in your head and it can be a method to get rid of these ongoing tunes.

In a portion of the experiment, Beaman and his team subjected 40 undergraduates to a particularly catchy tune for 30 seconds, and then told them to try to think about anything they liked, except the song. When the students were not chewing gum, they reported thinking about the song an average of nine times during the first three-minute period, and an average of 10 times during the second three-minute period. But when they were chewing gum, the number of times they thought about the song dropped to an average of just over six times during both periods. Perhaps not the silver bullet Edgar would have hoped for, but its progress.

 

Some Content Provided by LA Times – Catchy Tunes and Chewing Gum