Recently I went on a business trip to Florida. I was looking forward to sunny Florida and getting a little R & R between meetings. On the morning I was leaving for Florida I happened to pick up a newspaper on the plane that had an article from the L.A. Times called “Stuck!” The entire article was a report on the research of a professor at the University of Cincinnati about a problem he calls “Stuck Tune Syndrome.” You’ve probably experienced this. I know I certainly have! I get a tune stuck in my mine and it goes round and round for days before it finally vanishes. Sometimes it comes back weeks, months, or even years later to plague me again for awhile. I’ve heard many people talk about the phenomenon, but when I saw this article, I thought to myself “What perfect timing!” This is a problem I have suffered from my entire life and I was searching for an interesting topic for the October e-zine that day anyway. Plus, I wanted to see what the professor had discovered; especially if a cure was part of it!

Without giving you more information than you want, I will say that on my honeymoon long ago in 1971, we were in this gorgeous resort in the British Virgin Islands and all I could think about was the McDonalds jingle “You deserve a break today, so get out and get away to McDonalds!” No matter how hard I tried to substitute another tune, think about how much fun I was having, etc. I found myself plagued with that tune and that idiotic phrase going through my mind at least 500 times each day. It made me feel terribly guilty because I was otherwise having a great time.

According to Professor James Kellaris, certain types of music operate like mental mosquito bites. They create a cognitive “itch” that can only be scratched by replaying the tune in the mind. But unfortunately, the more the mind scratches, the worse the itch gets. Kellaris surveyed 1000 college students to see which tunes seemed to be the “stickiest” and also asked them how long the tunes had stuck. He was trying to identify characteristics in the tunes that might cause them to have the “sticking” effect. One of the things that he thought probably had an effect, not surprisingly, was lots of repetition.

For instance, the song “Follow the Yellow Brick Road” or Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” Another factor is musical simplicity; children’s songs are usually quite simple and for that reason are easy to remember and are usually remembered through life. Another, very different component of sticky songs, Kellaris found, is incongruity. Songs that have irregular rhythms and meters such as Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from West Side Story” with it’s syncopated 12/8 rhythm is very “sticky.” Some of today’s Hip-Hop music with it’s driving and repetitive riffs throughout are pretty sticky. Missy Elliot’s “Get Your Freak On,” comes to mind, although I certainly couldn’t recommend it as a piece of healing music. As a clinical musicologist I try to listen to all kinds of music so that I can relate to clients of all ages and musical tastes.

Diana Deutsch, psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, and editor of the journal Music Perception, believes that when a tune gets “stuck” it might have to do with the deeper meaning of the words involved. “Even songs without words can have a larger meaning.” Therefore when a song is going round and round in your head, you might ask yourself if the words have a deeper meaning for yourself. Of course if the tune is “I’m a Little Teacup” the meaning is all too obvious!

Here is the list of the top 10 most-often “stuck” tunes:

“The Macarena”
“I’m a Little Teacup”
“Gilligan’s Island
The Chili’s “Baby-back-rib” jingle
Tschaikovsky’s 1812 overture
Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler”
“YMCA”
Two “Dr. Pepper” jingles
Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtsmusik”
Theme from “The Andy Griffith Show”
To that I would add the theme from “The Beverly Hillbillies” and a couple of other classical melodies including some fugue subjects.

Music psychologists, neurologists, musicologists, and everyday folks know that music can exert a powerful grip on the mind. At the very least, a stuck tune can be annoying, but when one is really stuck, it can be almost maddening. One of the professor’s respondents claimed, perhaps jokingly, that he had the music from an Atari 260 video game playing in his head since 1986! What do you do what you have a stuck tune? Sad to say, there is no cure, but here are some of the things that people have tried with varying degrees of success:

Substituting another tune by thinking it, humming it or playing it. Unfortunately, it too could become stuck.

Turning to another distracting task like reading aloud, balancing your checkbook, or talking on the phone to a friend.

Trying a folk remedy like chewing on a cinnamon stick; this is actually said to be effective!

The old “cootie” method wherein the song is transferred to another by humming a few bars to the person and saying “now you’ve got it!”

As I said, it’s a frustrating situation but not fatal. Right now I would strongly recommend listening to all of your favorite old songs and instrumental favorites. Remember that the music of our “courting” years is said to be the most soothing and comforting and that’s what we all need right now.

Dr. Alice Cash is a clinical musiclogist, residing and practicing in Louisville, KY. Dr. Cash has spoken around the world on the healing power of music and other music-related topics such as “Wanda Landowska and the revivial of the harpsichord.” For more information on her work, visit http://www.HealingMusicEnterprises.com or http://www.DrCashPrefers.com. She is also a frequent guest expert on television and radio stations as well as other print media.