An “earworm” is a song that won’t stop playing in your head. It’s annoying for sure, and if it goes on too long the effect can be a bit maddening. A new study shows that it’s possible to chew away the earworms with a couple sticks of your favorite gum.
How this works is intriguing. Rather than distracting your brain from the insidious tune, the study suggests that chewing gum hijacks the same auditory mechanism your brain uses to replay it.
The researchers ran a few experiments to test the theory, including a comparison of chewing gum with “tapping”, an in vogue self-help practice that purportedly distracts the brain away from ruminating on unwanted thoughts. The results showed that tapping was more effective than doing nothing but was significantly less effective than chewing gum when it comes to controlling earworms.
Chewing gum, in the parlance of this study, is “an articulatory motor activity” that “interferes with the experience of ‘hearing’ musical recollections.” In other words, there’s something about chewing gum that disrupts the involuntary memory process that won’t turn off no matter how hard we try to “think” it off.
This finding underscores an insight that’s been gaining momentum in cognitive science overall: trying to wholesale delete or even significantly modify a thinking process is often less effective than hacking a way around it. In this case, we’re all well aware that trying to not think about the song guarantees that it won’t stop playing. The harder you try, the more persistent it becomes. Chewing gum (or chewing anything else that’s sufficiently chewy) doesn’t offer an enhanced thinking solution; it simply takes over the same cerebral rails the song was running along.
Source: Wikipedia
As odd as this sounds, chewing gum may end up being one of the most undervalued brain tools at our disposal. There’s a healthy body of research on how the simple act of chewing can tweak and enhance brain functions, including beneficial effects on memory, alertness, anxiety reduction, appetite suppression, mood and learning.
Studies like this one out of Cardiff University in the UK examined gum’s potential across multiple areas: learning, mood, memory and intelligence. The findings in this case were that both alertness and intellectual performance were increased in gum-chewing subjects, while memory showed no significant improvements.