Why you can't get it outta your head

I just can’t get you out of my head

Boy your lovin’ is all I think about

I just can’t get you out of my head

Boy it’s more than I dare to think about

So goes the annoyingly catchy Kylie song. Thankfully it doesn't get played as much now as in it's heyday, but suffice to say it was one of those songs that would lodge itself in your brain. Such things are known as earworms.

Mark Twain believed you could only dislodge an earworm from your mind if you could somehow manage to transfer it to someone else. Alas researchers have discovered some slightly more scientific reasons behind it all.

A team of researchers conducted an analysis of earworms in partnership with BBC 6 Music. They hoped to discover why some bits of music get stuck in our heads whilst others don't. What exactly are the triggers involved?

The study had over 600 participants, with the most popular cause of earwormry being that they were recently exposed to the addictive piece of music in question. Despite exposure to music wherever we go however the researchers found that a song does not have to be physically heard for it to get stuck in our heads.

Earworms can form merely by association, be that contact with certain people, certain situations or even words. Quite often these appear completely random

It appears that earworms often emerge when we're in a low attention state such as being bored or asleep.

"While musical imagery is a skill that many (especially musicians) can utilise to their advantage, involuntary musical imagery (INMI) is an involuntary, spontaneous, cognitive intrusion that, while not necessarily unpleasant or worrying, can prove hard to control," the researchers concluded. "The present study has classified the breadth of circumstances associated with the onset of an INMI episode in everyday life and provided insights into the origins of the pervasive phenomenon, as well as an illustration of how these different contexts might interact."

What triggers your own earworm experiences? Do you have any songs that are stuck in your head at the moment?