Earworms, also known as brain worms, are catchy songs that get embedded in your brain. These are songs that your brain continuous to focus on long after they've stopped playing. Some of the songs known to cause distracting or annoying earworms include "Who Let the Dogs Out?", "YMCA," and "It's a Small World After All."
Now a new study seems to offer an easier solution which provides fast relief from the annoying earworms. All you need to do is chew gum.
Researchers at the University of Reading in U.K. are reporting that people who chew gum after listening to catchy songs thought less about them than those in the study's control group. The study involved 98 participants who were subjected to catchy songs, including "Play Hard" by David Guetta and "Payphone" by Maroon 5. Participants were instructed to keep from think about the songs for at least 3 minutes and to tap their fingers if they still were.
Those who chewed gum reported a 33 percent improvement in their ability to effectively block out the songs. The researchers therefore concluded that chewing gum effectively helped participants get rid of unwanted thoughts – a practice that may also be applied to mental disorders that include intrusive thoughts.
"Interfering with our own 'inner speech' through a more sophisticated version of the gum-chewing approach may work more widely. However more research is needed to see whether this will help counter symptoms of obsessive-compulsive and similar disorders," Phil Beaman, study author from the University's School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, said.
The study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
