What Makes a Song Catchy? Psychology, Personality, and the Brain

The experience of having a song stuck in your head—known as an earworm—is one of the most common and curious quirks of the human mind. It affects between 88% and 98% of people. And what’s more fascinating? This phenomenon shows up remarkably evenly across cultures and demographics. Recent studies have uncovered the neural basis of the earworm experience. They show that it activates specific areas of the brain, particularly the auditory cortex and working memory systems. Interestingly, several factors can influence the likelihood of getting an earworm. These include the tempo of the song, its melodic structure, your personality traits, and how often you’re exposed to music.

One reason these psychological processes matter is that they reveal how our minds encode, store, and involuntarily replay music, often without intention. This has wide-reaching implications—from music creation and advertising to cognition, learning, memory, and even mental health disorders.

Exploring the relationship between music and the mind

The psychological mechanisms by which music captivates the human mind and impacts the various domains of cognitive function represent a vibrant field of research. This is experienced as “the inability to remove the song from one’s mind.” Typically, earworms are songs between 15 and 30 seconds in length. The phenomenon is strikingly common, with a couple of nationwide surveys showing prevalence figures of 91.7% of 12,420 Finnish internet users reporting frequent or daily problems with earworms and 88% of the western population reporting various levels of earworm experiences. 

The subjective experience of earworms varies from person to person, but is generally not disagreeable (otherwise they might be called worms instead), and in fact, research suggests that far from being an intrusive phenomenon, such musical fragments are perceived as being neutral to positive experiences. Emotional valence is the overall affective tone of the experience, but can change depending on the rate of repetition, familiarity of the song and personal preference, with more often repetition of a disliked song, fostering more negative opinions. Levels of time and annoyance for each earworm episode. The ranges in earworm duration are also quite variable, with earworms lasting anywhere from minutes to days, and both duration and irritation reported to be longer by women than by men. 

Neural Bases of Cognitive Processing 

The neurology of earworms is complex and involves a number of different regions of the brain, of which the auditory cortex is the major neural correlate of this phenomenon. Brain scans carried out at Dartmouth College found that the same region of the auditory cortex that is triggered when an individual listens to music is also activated when he or she thinks about it; and even when we are afflicted with invasive earworms—those annoying musical fragments that monopolise our thoughts—the ‘brain MP3 player’ starts to play the track. This neural reactivation happens in the left primary auditory cortex, where auditory information is processed (in the temporal lobe, a region linked to verbal short-term memory). 

Measures in brain and behaviour

The phonological loop component of working memory is a mechanism by which there arises earworms arise; the phonological loop “acts as a short loop of recording tape that [temporarily] stores small amounts of acoustic information.” It has been shown that earworms involve internal subvocal articulatory processes, the so-called “singing along,” which interferes with verbal working memory tasks during and after exposure to music.

The disruption shows that the earworm phenomenon does entail active cognitive simulation, rather than passive traces in memory, and the degree of interference correlates with how much the individual would like to sing along. Furthermore, the DMN, which is engaged during states of daydreaming and mind wandering, plays a role in the spontaneous generation of earworms. When our minds are not otherwise occupied, the default mode network can access stored melodies and bring them to our conscious awareness, providing the subjective experience of music “popping into one’s head” for no apparent reason. 

What Makes Catchy Tunes Catchy? 

Certain musical elements consistently increase a song’s likelihood of becoming an earworm, particularly tempo. Songs with a faster tempo (120–140 BPM) tend to feel more catchy due to their driving rhythm. They often feature simple, repetitive melodies and long phrases broken into smaller segments, aiding memory through repetition.

Catchy songs typically include distinctive melodic intervals and contours that set them apart from average tunes. These recognisable structures, common in Western music, make songs like Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” or Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” linger in the mind due to unusual intervals and memorable riffs.

Lyrics also matter. Songs with simple, repetitive, and easy-to-remember words—often crafted by pop music formulas—enhance catchiness. Repeating a single note or motif, along with rhythmic syncopation, boosts earworm potential. According to the earworm hypothesis, longer melodic lines and more pitches in the chorus hook strengthen a song’s memorability. Interestingly, male vocals tend to encourage more singing along, possibly due to unconscious social or evolutionary cues that heighten listener engagement.

Idiosyncratic and Vulnerability Factors 

Individual differences play a large role in earworm susceptibility, and musical involvement and training act as major predictors of both its occurrence and intensity. People who regard music as an important part of their lives, receive musical training, or are otherwise musically active, extract earworms more often than people with less of a musical predisposition. This relationship may occur based on greater exposure to musical stimuli and/or neurocognitive alterations that facilitate musical processing and memory encoding. 

Personality also moderates earworm experience, with both openness to experience and neuroticism acting as significant predictors. Those who are high in openness (which is associated with increased time spent listening to music) tend to be more responsive to earworms, whereas those who are more neurotic might experience more negative emotions during such intrusive musical episodes. There is evidence that earworm frequency is also related to other forms of repetitive behaviour: thus, people who report more frequent habits in both motor and mental tasks (foot-tapping, fidgeting, counting or internal repetition) also report enjoying earworms more frequently than less habit-prone individuals. 

Subclinical OC (obsessive-compulsive) tendencies are yet another significant trait difference, and the obsessional ruminative nature of earworms has been proposed to share brain substrates with habitual- and compulsive-like behaviours. This link suggests that earworms reflect more general patterns of mental repetition and cognitive control, rather than only musical phenomena. 

Triggers and Contributors 

Earworms usually start with a particular cue or trigger that activates an auditory memory, which can be a tune or a phrase of a song. Immediate musical exposure is the most direct trigger, with earworms more likely to occur when participants have heard the song in the past 24 hours. But, more intricate association triggers also significantly contribute to this, such as environmental triggers, emotional feelings, and cognitive associations that connect current events to music the participant has experienced in the past. 

Cognitive status is strongly connected with earworm-vulnerability, as being in a low attention state, engaging in mind-wandering and being in downtime are among major antecedents of having music on the mind. Studies have found that you are most likely to be affected by earworms when you are sleepy, bored, tired, or when working on a task with a low cognitive load, such as driving, walking or running. In contrast, exacting tasks involving high cognitive load, specifically verbal activities, do tend to interrupt earworms by using similar mental resources as those used for musical imagery 

Emotional factors also play a part in earworm triggering; a stressful experience, surprise, and certain mood states may enhance earworm formation by promoting associative musical memories. Finally, the recency effect in earworm reporting, with the most recently heard songs reported as more likely to get stuck in your head, highlights that temporal proximity to musical exposure is an important factor in determining which stimuli are more likely to spontaneously come to mind. 

Conclusion 

The psychological factors that contribute to a song’s catchiness and infectiousness, and marketing vs psychology, are the result of an intricate combination of neural mechanisms, musical properties, personal preferences, and environmental influences, all of which combine to make one song get stuck in our head instead of another. Given that it is also universal and involves basic cognitive functions like working memory and auditory processing.

However, it appears that earworms are in fact a fundamental aspect of human music perception, not a quirk of the brain. Directions for future research should pursue the therapeutic applications of knowing more about the mechanisms involved in earworms, the influence of cultural and linguistic factors on musical memory, and the possibility of links between visual and other forms of involuntary cognition. As we come to understand these processes more fully, we will continue to learn not just how musical experiences are born, but how human memory, attention, and consciousness function at their most basic level. 

FAQs

1. The reason one song gets stuck in your head (earworm), and how to get it out? 

Earworms result from an interaction between a few musical attributes — like simple, familiar melodies, repetitions and a fast pace — that activate brain regions including the auditory cortex and the working memory system, especially when your mind is wandering or when you’re engaged in something simple that doesn’t need much of your attention. 

2. Are some people more susceptible to earworms than others? 

People who listen to music a lot, have had some musical training, or score higher in a personality trait called openness to experience, also tend to get more earworms, while people with obsessive-compulsive tendencies would rate a given earworm as even more intrusive or repetitive. 

3. How does the brain process earworms? 

The auditory cortex and working memory (and in particular the phonological loop) are in charge of processing and mentally re-playing bits of music, often sparked by overheard or remembered tunes, mood-state or external cues: the “brain’s IPod” reproduces interior aural fragments even in silence. 

4. Is it bad to have an earworm, or just annoying? 

For most people, earworms are neutral or positive, although some listeners can find familiar songs uninvited into their mind annoying, particularly if it’s a song that they don’t like very much, and especially if a person is high on certain personality traits or particular mood states. 

5. What makes a song catchy? 

Catchy songs tend to have simple, repetitive melodies with unique rhymes, easy-to-remember, catchy hooks, and a 120-140 BPM range to make the song easy to remember (and retch up the next time you hear your friend say “Wasssup” on the street). 

6. Can you stop an earworm? 

Cognitively challenging tasks or word-based activities can help to disrupt earworms by competing for the same brain resources that are generating the musical imagery. Distraction or listening to another song can also be effective.