In Brief

22 July 2015

Can’t get Kylie out of your head? Blame the shape of your brain

HOW often you get tunes stuck in your head seems to be linked to the structure of your brain.

A team led by Lauren Stewart at Goldsmith’s, University of London asked 44 people how frequently they got these “earworms”.

MRI scans revealed that those who regularly got a song stuck in their head had thicker cerebral cortices in areas involved in auditory perception and pitch discrimination. Those who said they found earworms helpful for staying focused tended to have a larger hippocampus, an area involved in memory. And people who got annoyed by earworms had more grey matter in an emotion-related region, the temporal pole (Consciousness and Cognition,

Earworms are spontaneous thoughts, and studying them could lead to insights into daydreaming, Stewart says.