How Chewing Gum Can Stop Unwanted Songs From Playing In Your Head

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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.

Other studies have found that some aspects of memory can be improved by chewing gum, particularly immediate and delayed word recall. A widely covered 2011 study found that chewing gum before taking a test improved performance, but chewing gum throughout the test did not. The possible reason for this result is that chewing gum may warm-up the brain, something gum researchers refer to as ”mastication-induced arousal.”  In fact, chewing gum for about 20 minutes is on par with mild exercise in terms of sending more blood to the brain.

Studies have also found gum to be an effective anxiety remedy under certain conditions. This 2009 study, for instance, found that under laboratory conditions chewing gum resulted in reduced cortisol levels (cortisol is the best known of the stress hormones) and a reduction in overall anxiety.

The science of chewing gum is still somewhat speculative, but studies like the most recent one on stopping earworms are beginning to pinpoint the specific mechanisms at play. Regardless, in this age of confusing psycho-therapeutic remedies, there are few things less risky than chewing a few sticks of sugarless to potentially enhance brain function.

The latest study is published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

You can find David DiSalvo on Twitter @neuronarrative and at his website daviddisalvo.org.

Source: Forbes