[mbrutsch]

I take it from the article that this would solve one of my biggest internal issues: songs getting stuck in my head. It's gotten so bad in recent years that I don't listen to music at all, because it may stimulate a "earwig" that will not stop.

[derefr]

AFAIK, we've long solved this one: a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure"—trying to complete a pattern. You likely heard the beginning of the song, and that set off your mind trying to remember the rest, but you can't remember the ending, so it just keeps spinning on it.

The easy fix is the unintuitive one: listen to the song. Then, as soon as you've given your mind closure on the pattern, get your mind out of the rut of analyzing the pattern by listening to something else (also to completion.)

More precisely, the experience of having a song stuck in your head is strongly analogous to the experience of having been half-told a joke. You've sort of allocated a mental context buffer and it's waiting around to receive the rest of the context, so that it can then evaluate the 'punchline'. The simplest way to discard the buffer ("ruin the joke") is to just get the punchline early, without the rest of the context. If you go through a bit of music theory, you can recognize a song as a pattern of building and releasing tension. You could actually just listen to the part of a song that finally releases the tension—closes the matching parenthesis to the opening one your mind is stuck on—and that would do the trick. Listening to the whole song is just easier.

[Zecc]

> a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure".

I usually turn off my car's stereo only at the end of musical phrases for just this reason. This phenomenon happens a lot to me.

There is a song, stuck in my head since a little over a decade ago, which ends with a fade out, not providing any closure at all.

It still pops up occasionally, but fortunately I can usually override it by recalling any of a number of favorite other song loops I have collected through the years and haven't gotten tired of yet.