Not an earworm but a...brainworm?

February 26, 2021 12:03 PM

Is there a name for a song that repeats itself in your head for decades? Not just a catchy earworm that you can’t get out of your head for a couple of hours/days, but a song that crops up whenever your mind is a little bit quiet; the song you always whistle.

My husband and I both do this, and he has always whistled/hummed/sang a couple bars of the same two songs for decades. Not a particularly favorite song or even one that you might imagine suits the person’s personality, just something that’s always there, a permanent fixture of the mind when quiet or wandering.

Is there a name for this? Do others experience it? What causes it? It’s not bothersome or annoying; I have no desire to get rid of it or change the song (as I might with an earworm), but tonight after hearing my husband whistle the same refrain for the eleventy-billionth time I thought there must be others who do this too! (I’d be curious to hear what others’ songs are as well, but don’t want to make this too chat-filtery). Thanks!

posted by stillmoving to Grab Bag (30 answers total)

I experience it - and the "default song" in my head is annoying, so it's irritating. I've been reverting to that same song since I was 9 and I'm now 52. And yes, I experience it as different from earworms, which are always temporary.

There are apparently some studies of it.
posted by Miko at 12:07 PM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Personal theme song? Although that kind of implies that it’s something you choose.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:10 PM on February 26, 2021

I experience this too. Mine is some Christian kids song.
posted by redlines at 12:37 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

My earworms usually cycle out every week or so. This week it's the Muppet Show theme. I can't even remember last week's earworm, probably fortunately. Sometimes I switch up the lyrics to feline-themed for my cat's enjoyment, so "Dirty boots!" becomes "Dirty cats!" etc.

I have songs from decades ago that occasionally surface, but I don't think they stick around longer than more recent songs. I tend to have a pretty varied music listening diet, and play an instrument, so maybe that keeps the permanent earworms at bay.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:41 PM on February 26, 2021

The Radiolab episode “Earworms” makes mention of the phenomenon you are referring to. It’s a really good episode—the whole thing is fascinating!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:46 PM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

This has happened to me. I am definitely not an expert, but from my two day crash course in child psycology and experience, this is what seems to cause it. Your brain remembers things chemically. Sometimes one item at a time, but other times in what they call clusters. Kind of like file folders. When you learn a new thing like driving a car, your brain clusters all these things together. When you learn something new about the same subject, like there is a red light cam on Main Street, this gets added to your driving cluster. You don't remember everything about driving. These clusters are not just theoretic, they can actually be imaged.
So somehow some songs got added to your cluster involving a common task. For me, the task was mowing the lawn. More specifically, mowing the lawn at my house. There are a couple of songs that somehow made it into my grass cutting cluster. Whenever I cut grass at my house hearing one or both of the songs and start humming.
So for you, these songs somehow made it into one of your common neural clusters. Maybe doing the dishes, vacuuming, or something like that.
For regular earworms, I think it is the same kind of thing, but they get associated with your short term memory like that you need to pick up your dry cleaning or you are having the Harts over for dinner on the 23rd.
posted by Short End Of A Wishbone at 12:52 PM on February 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

I have one of these - I also think of it as my "default song". The first time I remember realizing it was always there was back in 3rd grade - I am now 38 and it's still the same song. I have other songs that are tied to specific tasks and have been in place for a long time, as Short End of a Wishbone mentions, but the default song has been around the longest and shows up in almost any situation.

My default song is The Butcher Boy, specifically as sung by Schooner Fare. Oddly, when I find myself singing it without thinking, I very rarely find that I've started at the beginning of the song - I almost always start with verse 3.
posted by darchildre at 1:20 PM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Like the fictional Tripledent Gum Commercial from Inside Out?

I feel that the English appropriation of Ohrwurm (literally: earwig, the insect [wrongly] rumoured to burrow into the brains of sleeping humans through the ear and lay eggs) loses the body-horror aspect of being in thrall to a truly malignant earworm. Before my ADHD diagnosis and blessed prescriptions, every waking hour had Henhouse Five Plus Two's version of In The Mood as a backing track. Which I think I heard once in the late 1970s, and it lodged there forever.

For me, it's definitely a pattern, a prion, a defect that won't go away. At least on meds my interior chicken coop sings different songs now (this morning it was Life on Mars) and is mostly quiet by 09:30

(Fun fact: Hh5+2 was an alias of Ray Stevens, responsible for 1974's execrable The Streak, among many other musical crimes.)
posted by scruss at 1:20 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have a couple of snippets of tunes that I often (without intending to) start humming or quietly whistling, when in stressful/rushed work situations. No idea why they got attached to that particular situation and dynamic, but it happens a lot, and has been going on for many years now.
posted by theatro at 1:21 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oliver Sacks in his book Musicophilia has a section on earworms and the origin of melodies that replay themselves over and over and many stories of sufferers. It is a truly fascinating book.
posted by 15L06 at 2:10 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I have, like, a half dozen of these extremely long-term earworms. I have a song that I made up in 1st grade to remember how to spell a friend's name that has popped up for a run every few months for oh, 30+ years. I have a song (with complete, 100% non sequitur-but-consistent lyrics) that dates back to maybe early middle school, that goes with walking on a sidewalk and observing the distance between the squares/any noteworthy cracks - this one has basically never left and comes up once a week (well, once a week when going outside was more of a thing). I've got some others that are "actual" songs - the limbo song is for repetitive at-work tasks. I was diagnosed with pure-o type OCD as an adult, and my therapist has suggested that this tendency might be related.
posted by cocotine at 2:11 PM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

I have a mental list of earworm-capable tunes, and when one gets annoying/ intrusive, I purposely keep trying a different one; this is usually successful. I suspect that repetition strengthens the neural pathway of any given snippet.

There's a plot device in The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (pretty sure) where telepathy is a thing, and mind-readers are posted, scanning the populace for criminal intent. Someone is able to defeat this by commissioning an earworm that is so fierce he is able to keep it in mind and evade the mind-scanners. I recall at one point a mind-scanner gives him a look of horror on encountering the ear-worm, even telepathically.
posted by theora55 at 2:28 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Mine is a little diddy I learned and played on the recorder in elementary school. I just sing the notes to its melody in my head and have for the last 35-odd years. A-C-G-C-FGFDEA-D-D-C-A-FGAFG.
posted by cgg at 3:34 PM on February 26, 2021

When my mind goes quiet, the song that plays is the circus part of A Treatise on Cosmic Fire by Todd Rundgren. I've had that one for decades.
posted by bink at 3:41 PM on February 26, 2021

I experience this as well. There is the occassional earworm that will go on and on from when I wake up to when I fall asleep for days. Thankfully, they fade eventually. I also have a rotation of little snippets of music that playback almost continuously if I don't have anything else in mind. For instance, the conclusion of Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation," which I have not heard for some twenty-five years because of hearing loss, has been on the playlist this week.
posted by Stuka at 3:45 PM on February 26, 2021

Yes, mine was Yellow Submarine, but I trained myself out of it because it did bother me.
posted by aniola at 4:28 PM on February 26, 2021

When I am anxious or having suicidal ideation one of Rolf Harris's (Yuck! I can not separate the artist from their work, so it makes things worse) songs (Two little boys) and the lines that keep going through my head are:
"Did you think I'd leave you dying
when there's room on my horse for two?"

Thanks brain (NOT)
posted by b33j at 4:29 PM on February 26, 2021

b33j, you poor bastard … that song comes to me sometimes, and it's terrible
posted by scruss at 4:35 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Theora55, you are right: it is in The Demolished Man, and the song is "Tenser, said the Tensor"
My own earworm for life is "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (Grieg) -- I got lucky
posted by librosegretti at 4:43 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Thank you librosegretti! I read it years ago, that bit has stuck.
posted by theora55 at 4:53 PM on February 26, 2021

I'm haunted by Gary Wright's Dream Weaver, after working for years as a temp at a law firm prosecuting a D. WEAVER for fraud.

That hideous song was in my head all day, every day...
posted by grateful at 6:23 PM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Song about this.

I find it useful to really look at the lyrics and the time in which they were composed. Or to remember exactly what was going on the first time I heard the song. It's not random.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 7:55 PM on February 26, 2021

I have what seems to be a phrase from a Sousa or similar march (though which one I don't know) that appears weekly. Almost any other piece of music I actually hear (on TV, radio, streaming, whatever) will displace it...for a while.
posted by lhauser at 9:44 PM on February 26, 2021

My brain has defaulted to Black Hole Sun for years. I make it work for me by timing my handwashing by two verses and a chorus.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 10:20 PM on February 26, 2021

Mine's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. I have no idea why.
posted by The Half Language Plant at 11:11 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I count myself exceedingly lucky that not only is mine this, but sometimes it plays all the way through.

It's very rarely quiet in here; the internal radio station is always playing something. But the Partita is on the highest rotation, and has been for as long as I can remember. Certainly since before I first went to school.

Thanks, Mum.
posted by flabdablet at 3:45 AM on February 27, 2021

Mine is the opening lines to the Stray Cat Strut, over and over and over again. It's a great opening, but really. It comes and goes, so maybe months go by and I won't think of it, but then it'll come back. Why this song in particular I have no idea. It doesn't seem to pair with any activity or thought pattern in particular.

I've found however that it's a sign I haven't been listening to music enough, so fortunately there's an easy fix for me.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 5:58 AM on February 27, 2021 [1 favorite]

A nurse whom I used to see at a weekly appointment for over a year was always humming a quiet little tune. I finally asked her if it was "Bittersweet Symphony" by Verve, and I was right.
posted by Leontine at 6:42 AM on February 27, 2021

I've found however that it's a sign I haven't been listening to music enough

Hm, that makes me speculate it's one of those phenomena that Sacks writes about a lot, that when a system is unoccupied it manufactures its own data to keep active.
posted by Miko at 7:40 AM on February 27, 2021

Mine is the opening of Bruckner's Symphony No 4. It's not so bad, it doesn't really bother me, but I sometimes start to hum it without realizing it. That can really tic people off.
posted by james33 at 10:02 AM on February 27, 2021