“Blue Tongue” by Patrick Doheny – originally posted to Flickr as Blue Tongue. Licenced under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_Tongue.jpg#/media/File:Blue_Tongue.jpg

Chewing gum could be the way to get unwanted tunes out of your head according to newly-published research. It’s based on the idea that moving your jaw can impede both short-term memory and recollection of sound.

Researchers at the University of Reading were interested in the way that not only do different people seem to have different ‘earworm’ songs with little repetition between people, but that the duration which such a song stayed (unwanted) in the mind varied significantly.

They explored the idea that earworms are part of the wider issue of thought suppression, an ability that also varies widely among people. That appears to be linked to the person’s overall cognitive capacity and their ability to cope with a high cognitive load — that is, the amount of information they are trying to process simultaneously. Perhaps surprisingly, it appears earworms are more likely to take effect when cognitive load is very high or very low.

The researchers exploring ideas to see if artificially influencing cognitive load to more average levels could help suppress earworms. As well as tricks such as asking the subject to count, move their eyes in a specific manner, or listen to other audible stimulation, they looked into the idea that chewing might work.

The logic is that inner speech — that is, thinking words or sounds in your head — uses the same motor programming as if you were physically moving your jaw to speak or sign out loud. The theory went that chewing would create ‘real’ signals to the brain and override the motor programming from the inner speech.

To test the idea, subjects heard one of two particularly catchy songs (Play Hard by David Guetta and Payphone by Maroon 5) and were then monitored for three minutes, during which some subjects chewed gum. During this time they were told to try not to think of the song, but to press a key every time they did.

The results showed that on average the subjects who chewed gum thought of the song less often during the three minutes. A follow-up test showed this was still true when only measuring cases with a stricter definition of an earworm: “hearing” the song in their head rather than merely thinking about it.