Monday, April 30, 2007

Song-stuck-in-your-head phenomenon

BY Vadim Prokhorov


The term "earworm" is a translation of the German word Ohrwurm, used to describe the "musical itch" of the brain.
It is the auditory cortex — the "brain's iPod" — that earworms choose as the centre of their activity.
Treated earworms go away in one day, untreated earworms in 24 hours.


DID YOU see Mission: Impossible III earlier this year? If you did, then you are probably stuck with the "MI" theme repeating over and over in your head. According to James Kellaris, marketing professor at the University of Cincinnati, the "MI" theme is currently ranked sixth on the Top 10 Earworm List. His study, Dissecting Earworms: Further Evidence on the `Song-Stuck-in-Your-Head' Phenomenon, found that at one time or another nearly 99 per cent of people have had earworms — those sticky tunes that people cannot get out of their heads. "They seem to repeat themselves involuntarily inside the mind of the hapless victim," says Professor Kellaris. On average, the episodes may last several hours and happen quite frequently in "chronic sufferers."

The term "earworm" is a translation of the German word Ohrwurm, used to describe the "musical itch" of the brain. It is a confusing term, since the phenomenon has nothing to do with small maggot-like creatures crawling into your ear and laying eggs in your brain. The musical earworm actually works more like a virus, attaching itself to a host and keeping itself alive by feeding off the host's memory. Nor does the earworm occur in the ear, as researchers at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, demonstrated in their study, Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex.

The American philosopher Kenneth Burke once asked: "When a bit of talking is taking place, just what is doing the talking?"

The Dartmouth researchers discovered that the talking is done by the auditory cortex, which perceives and stores our auditory memories. And it is the auditory cortex — the "brain's iPod" — that earworms chose as the centre of their activity.

"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."

At first, the researchers asked the study's 15 students to identify which songs were familiar or unfamiliar to them, thus developing an individualised playlist for each subject. The Rolling Stones' Satisfaction and the Beatles' Yellow Submarine were included among familiar songs with lyrics, and Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the theme from The Pink Panther among familiar instrumental tunes.

"When the subjects were in the MRI scanner, which we used to look at the brain activity, we played them parts of a song and then hit a mute button for three or five seconds," says Mr. Kraemer. "We didn't tell them that we were going to cut out the sound. For songs people were familiar with, they automatically put the missing part in there." The auditory cortex continued "singing." When listening to an unfamiliar song, the subjects did not hear anything after the sound stopped. "They didn't try to continue the song," says Mr. Kraemer.

Emily Cross, also a graduate student at Dartmouth and one of the subjects of the study, says that with familiar songs it was as if "the brain was connecting the dots. You are not surprised when the song picks up, because you have been playing it all along in your head. With unfamiliar songs though, you either wait in silence or, if it's predictable enough, you make up the missing bits." After leaving the scanner, she noticed that the songs were spontaneously popping up in her head for quite a while.

This retrieval of auditory images — whether deliberate or spontaneous — appears to be "perception in reverse," says Mr. Kraemer. That is, the process follows the neural path that was involved in the actual perception, only backwards.

What triggers the retrieval of a particular song — making it come to mind and get stuck in the head — is not exactly known. It might be anything: a title, a thought or a reminder of past experience that somehow is connected to a melody. Or it could just be a few notes that prompt the brain to refresh the memory and find the missing parts of the song.

"Earworms seem to be an interaction between properties of music [catchy songs are simple and repetitive], characteristics of individuals [levels of neuroticism] and properties of the context or situation [first thing in the morning, last thing at night or when people are under stress]," says Professor Kellaris.

Most of the time we do not pay much attention to our earworms — every moment of the day we are bombarded with fresh auditory information, so we are constantly distracted from concentrating on them. Still, people react differently to this stuck-song syndrome. Professor Kellaris found that women are more susceptible to earworms than men. And musicians more than non-musicians. "Musicians are probably prone to earworms by merit of the greater exposure to music and repetition they encounter in rehearsals," he says. "But why are women? That's a mystery." However, earworms are more problematic for those inclined to worry, and women had higher neuroticism scores than men, says Professor Kellaris.

Eraser tunes


When earworms become a problem, he says, "some people swear by `eraser tunes'; those that have a mystical ability to eat any other earworms. Singing the eraser tune rids one of an earworm but risks replacing it with the eraser song." A friend of mine uses Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, though it can also become an earworm.

You can also pass earworms on to someone else — sharing it certainly lightens things up. Or if a song is stuck because you can't remember some of the words or how it ends, then listening to it or singing it in its entirety may help unstick it.

"What works pretty well for people who are plagued by earworms is to ask them what may be causing them," says Diana Deutsch, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. "People sing along with something internal, so music reflects what is in the back of a person's mind, serving as some kind of personal reminder. If they remember that, music often goes off in their heads."

Or perhaps we simply have to remember the main rule of the human-earworm relationship: treated earworms go away in one day, untreated earworms in 24 hours.

Some day scientists will be able to find a vaccine for earworm infections. Apparently, 1 per cent of people are immune to this disease. Or are they? "I think," says Professor Kellaris, "that people who say that they do not experience earworms are lying or don't recall their earworm episodes." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006









© Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu

Are social-networking sites making us reclusive?

BY SHARANYA HARIDAS


RECENTLY A friend of mine did the unthinkable — she deleted her profile from a popular social networking site of which she was a member, binned all those touching testimonials and friendship ratings sent by mates and adoring fans, kissed goodbye to that whole long list of contacts and resigned herself to a life of solitary sanyasin.

Ok, not quite. The next few lines are not for the weak hearted among those of you `propah' 21st century netizens for they could result in serious ear-bleeding, so if you belong to this category you are advised to lay off.

In an age where this modern means of communication is shrinking distances between people and has flattened this wide, wide world into a compact and easily accessible global community and where not belonging to at least one of these networking sites is equivalent to social non-existence, this extraordinary diva shall for ever go down in 21st century history as one who has renounced civilisation — as Mahavira did in his time; for where is civilisation in the 21st century, but online? As it turns out, renouncing this site was only the tip of the iceberg; the real shocker arrived when she publicly confessed to being addicted to it and declared this move as being "the most liberating and satisfying thing" she had done in a long time.

Not an isolated case


Shocking? Absurd? Not to those of us for whom the internet is steadily becoming or — God forbid — has already become something of an addiction. Although this new disease — `netsieze'?! — of internet addiction permeates all barriers of age and gender, it is seen to be most widely prevalent among youngsters and is spreading with all the rapidity with which mosquitoes multiply in the summer.

Just a few weeks ago, IIT Mumbai announced its decision to help its students `get a life' by terminating internet connectivity for an hour between 11.30 p.m. and 12.30 a.m. Apparently, these juvenile netizens, like countless others all over the nation, were engaging in the greatest delinquency of them all — hitting self destruction by choosing to stay online over all other activities: attending classes, studying, pursuing other hobbies or means of recreation and forging new real-life relationships.

Although the move provoked mixed reactions, it brought to light the possibility of the internet in general and social-networking sites in particular making people more reclusive than social.

So what is it about these sites that makes them so difficult to stay away from?

Through the sociologists' gaze: in a world cut up by implicit rules that firmly though subtly govern our thought, speech and behaviour, these sites are the knives that free us from the shackles of rules of behaviour and codes of conduct; it is not uncommon to see the meekest of sheep among us morph into dexterous lions, able and willing to assert themselves via their every roar through cyberspace.

This is evident from the soaring popularity of news blogs and `serious' communities which were earlier cited as being the forte of the intellectual elite but now have every Tom, Dick ad Harry out to air their views on the latest happenings around the world.

In these giant goldfish bowls, ideas are the bubbles that people play around with until a new one blows their way — seemingly going nowhere; here, petty competition through frivolous debates is ubiquitous as bloggers vie with one another for the kind of satisfaction best described in the words of psychologist John Dewey — "the desire to be important" — and it is exactly this need, which often goes unrecognised in the real world, that all these sites are capitalising upon.

Second life and other sites of that ilk, which allow netizens to live a virtual life, forge virtual relationships, etc., do have a huge following, but also appear to be promoting varied versions of new-age schizophrenia by causing people to draw a subtle mental line of division between their `online' and `offline' personalities. Distressingly, the online one — often far removed from reality — is usually reported as being more interesting and satisfying; clearly, a dangerous deviation from a healthy personality pattern.

If you fall in the above category, or suspect that you are headed in that direction it would do you good to be reminded of all the internet ill-effects on your physical health — each time you groggily drag yourself away from the 'net and into the real world, eyes strained and bloodshot, back sore from rigid hours spent in computer-chairs and limbs feeling like unset jelly.

And if that does not compel you to put a stop to this vicious and self destructive cycle, just pause for a second and think of the message you are sending out to the world by your endless hours spent online — that you have way too much time on hand and not much else to do and no real-world social life. The bottom line? The number of hours you spend online is inversely reflective of your having a life.

Ought to give you some food for thought when you choose to log in next. haridas.sharanya@gmail.com