I was concerned when my German friend told me she had an earworm and asked her if she needed to go to the doctor to get the (possibly parasitic) worm out of her ear.
She laughed and replied that no, she did not need to go to the doctor; she just had some stupid pop song stuck her in head that she couldn’t get rid of.
The word earworm—which is quite possibly my new favorite word-- originates from the German word “ohrwurm.” Earworms are the songs that loop and repeat in your head over and over whether you like the song all that much or not. According to this research, nine out of ten people have experienced ear worms at some point in their lifetimes for sixty minutes or longer and one out of ten people has found the ear worm so distracting that they were unable to complete other tasks.
This site claims that the original German ohrwurms were in fact real worms that “could crawl in your ear.” (I’m going to try and forget that I ever read and wrote that so I can sleep at night.)
Getting rid of catchy musical earworms is not easy; the same researchers who studied the frequency of the earworms found that deliberately trying to get an ear worm out of your head can be “counterproductive” and can actually make the earworm stay in your head longer. A poor strategy for dealing with earworms might be replacing one earworm for another; as this writer points out, you might “develop a playlist of earworms” this way.
The Wikipedia site on earworms offers up a few interesting examples of “Earworms in Fiction”; my personal favorite from the short list of examples is “Demolished Man”, a sci-fi novel from the 1950’s. In the novel, the main charater “uses a jingle specifically crafted to be a catchy, irritating nuisance as a tool” to prevent people from reading his mind by blocking out his thoughts. (It occurs to me that Harry Potter himself could have benefited from a similar tool to stop Voldemort from reading Harry’s mind and entering his head without permission.)
(As an aside, several sites focusing on earworms want Trekkies to understand that musical ear worms are different from “the mind-warping parasites from Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan,”. It’s just a guess, but I have a feeling the Star Trek earworms are worse.
Image Courtesy of Flckr User: jemsweb