STICKY MUSIC

After running a few errands this morning, I returned home and started humming a song. I didn’t pay too much mind to what I was humming until I stopped and realized, “I am singing, Three Blind Mice.” How dumb is that!  Well, it got not only dumber but extremely irritating, because I couldn’t rid myself of the ditty in my head. Don’t know what precipitated it, unless I was thinking of the voters in the forthcoming election. Nah! It couldn’t be that.

What had lodged in my memory, like a broken record, was an “earworm”---an annoying tune that repeats itself in an endless loop. Scientists who study the earworm phenomena suggest that to get rid of it one should replace the song with more amenable thoughts. They suggest that working on a Sudoku Puzzle or on anagrams (word games rearranging letters) or reading something that will challenge the cognitive part of your brain will do the trick.

So, I picked up Consumer Reports Magazine and started reading page after page about, “How to Protect Your Privacy.” The article was so depressing that I threw the magazine into the trash and cheered myself up by singing, “Three Blind Mice---See how they run”---and then I forgot the rest of the lyrics which made me feel even worse.

Three quarters of people who experience earworms report unique songs not experienced by others. A western Washington team of scientists found that Lady Gaga was the most common artist to get stuck in people’s heads with pop songs such as Just Dance and Paparazzi. That sounds like much more fun than getting stuck with three mice.

While reading about earworms, I learned that the song, “Put the Blame on Mame”, obsessed Jean Harris, who murdered her lover, Herman Tarnower. If I remember correctly, the three blind mice had something to do with a butcher knife. Maybe she could have blamed them instead of Mame.

Here are some suggested cures for earworm:

Identify the song playing in your head.

Well, that won’t work for me because sometimes I make up Country Western songs in my head such as, “I won’t leave until I milk the cow. I won’t leave until I slop the sow. I won’t leave until I mow the hay. I guess I just won’t leave today. ” And those are just the lyrics.

Search the Internet for the complete version of the tune in your head.

That’s impossible, because to do that, you have to know the name of the song.

Play the tune for several minutes and listen to it.

Hooray!  That way the earworm can become a permanent mental soundtrack you can never eliminate from your brain.

After the song is finished playing, go and do something that avoids your mind from wandering.

Impossible!  My mind goes places I’ve never even been.

Replace the earworm with another song.

That’s just what I need---twin earworms.  So where’s the answer?

“The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind”

Esther Blumenfeld