The anatomy of an earworm

In the pantheon of memorable pop songs, Chappell Roan’s ‘HOT TO GO!’ is right up there. A breezy, unpretentious electropop effort, it has quite a forgettable verse, but that soon gives way to a shouty, cheerleader-style chorus in which Ms Roan repeatedly informs us that she is, indeed, ‘hot to go’. Somehow I recently heard it twice in one day, and that was all it took for ‘HOT TO GO!’ to get stuck on repeat in my mind’s ear for three whole days.

Of course, I’ve had earworms before, but never for longer than a few hours; this was something else, worming on an epic scale. It became the soundtrack to every moment of my waking life, the unofficial theme tune of every person I saw. Angry bus drivers, puking drunks, people crying on the news – everyone, it seemed, was suddenly hot to go!

I couldn’t remember most of the lyrics, but my brain helpfully made some up to cover the gaps: ‘Turn around and touch your nose / Rub your eyes just like a mole / Sing out loud, I’m hot to go!’ Self-loathing was therefore added to the torment, as I knew that this element of the nightmare was entirely of my own making.

Inevitably, I consulted Dr Internet, who has no shortage of suggestions for dealing with earworms: distract yourself with work, listen to other music, listen to the earworm song all the way through, engage in physical exercise. I tried the first two but ignored the second pair – in both cases, because I simply couldn’t bear to – but it was hopeless. So my mind started to turn to the bigger questions: is life worth living? What’s the point of it all? And why on earth was this even happening to me?

Sometimes, an earworm’s cause is obvious – you walk out of a shop before a song has finished playing, so your brain gives you the rest later on. Or you see Keir Starmer on TV, and five minutes later you’re whistling ‘Nowhere Man’. But sometimes, the meaning is more obscure. And what of this new horror – could my brain’s refusal to let go of ‘HOT TO GO!’ be my own strange way of telling myself I was hot to go?

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No one can say for sure, but the consensus is that earworms must have developed for some sort of evolutionary purpose. Many believe that they’re a by-product of our pattern-recognition skills, which gave us a survival advantage in the very olden days by allowing us to recall the sounds made by approaching predators, rival troglodytes etc. But earworms often strike in the middle of the night, when we’ve woken up and can’t get back to sleep – where’s the evolutionary advantage in that? Would our ancestors really have gained from being tricked into thinking a mardy mammoth was mooing outside their cave all night, when really it was just their own brains training them? If anything, I’d have thought that would put a bit of a crimp in their hunting skills the next day.

So maybe it has more to do with how we teach and learn. It’s a safe bet that the first song you ever committed to memory was the one we use to teach the alphabet, and I’d further wager that if someone asked you to recite the alphabet in a deadpan, tuneless way right now, the temptation to fractionally speed up on ‘L, M, N, O, P’ would be almost irresistible. That’s a measure of how deeply embedded a song has to be before we can use it as an aide-memoire, and the embedding process always starts with repetition. So perhaps earworms are just what happens when your brain repeatedly hears something that sounds like something it needs to learn and decides to start learning it – irrespective of any feelings you might have on the matter, or indeed your capacity to withstand it.

It’s probably no coincidence, then, that the most persistent earworms often bear some resemblance to tribal chants and/or playground counting songs (hello ‘HOT TO GO!’). Those are the kinds of song the human brain is used to learning, so anything that sounds even vaguely similar will be considered fair game by the tiny earworm farmers that live inside it. And although their compulsive posting and reposting of those tunes to the message board of your consciousness can, at times, feel like harassment, they may just be trying to make you feel safe.

Take the case of Joe Simpson, a mountaineer who fell into an icy crevasse and got trapped there with a broken leg (they made a film about it – Touching the Void). After using his skill and cunning to escape, he had to crawl/hop for three days in order to get back to base camp. Suffering from frostbite and severe dehydration, he was soon delirious and lost. And it was at this moment of peak despair that Boney M’s ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ entered his head and simply would not leave. ‘It just went on and on and on, for hours,’ he said later. ‘I was thinking, “Bloody hell, I’m going to die to Boney M.”’

As for me, I can think of worse things, but Simpson, with that particular brand of solemn understatement that so often characterises men of action, has said, ‘I don’t really like Boney M’s music’. So he must have felt like his own brain was torturing him, for no good reason and at the worst possible time. But what if there was another explanation? What if his brain’s evolutionary mechanisms had kicked in and decided, ‘We need something to get us through this! I know – bit of Boney M!’ The fact that his conscious mind was not a fan may well have been less important than the associations the song held for his subconscious.

‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ is a song that children have sung for generations, so it’s immediately redolent of playgrounds, childhood, home. Simpson would have been 18 when it was first in the charts, so he would certainly have heard it at teenage parties and discos – creating an additional association with the feelings of excitement, freedom and optimism that even the dourest individuals occasionally experience at that age. And as an old, traditional song with a repetitive vocal melody, it’s exactly the kind of thing those tiny earworm farmers latch on to, in the mistaken belief that they’ll need to remember it for the next tribal gathering or whatever.

So when you tot everything up, it seems understandable that Simpson’s brain chose to regale him with that particular song at that particular time; in its own ham-fisted way, it was trying to remind him of home, the people he’d loved, the fun he’d had and everything else that had made his life worth living. To keep him going.

With a bit of thought, it’s possible to find an equally charitable explanation for any of the other earworms that plague us. However infuriating they may be to live with, however often they get it wrong, they only want the best for us – a lot like parents, really. So the next time you’re assaulted by an earworm in the middle of the night, try asking it a few pertinent questions before trying to get rid. Make peace with your worms – make pets of them, even. But if one of them turns out to be Chappell Roan’s ‘HOT TO GO!’, I’d respectfully advise you to get it straight down the rescue shelter and insist that they put it to sleep.