How to Set Your Earworm Free

Nursery rhymes and kid-friendly tunes are also strong earworm contenders. They're composed to be catchy with an ear toward repetition, and as a result, memorisation. At their core, earworms are a form of rumination. Research suggests that people who suffer from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder are more prone to earworms. There's even a small subset of the population that suffers from earworms on steroids. Dubbed Intrusive Musical Imagery, or IMI, these musical obsessions can last for months, even years,. wreaking havoc on the person's life and work.