Dr Kelly Jakubowski talks about her research on the spontaneous mental recall and repetition of music in the ‘mind’s ear’, known as involuntary musical imagery or ‘earworms’, is a frequent and ubiquitous experience in the Western world. Despite its widespread prevalence, psychological enquiry into the mechanisms underlying the earworm experience is relatively recent. Over the past decade and a half, she and other researchers have begun to unpack the common triggers of earworm episodes and the contexts in which earworms most likely to occur, individual differences in personality, musical background, and cognitive styles that predict earworm frequency and reactions to earworms, and effective strategies for alleviating unwanted earworms. Dr Kelly Jakubowski’s research has also uncovered specific musical features that predict whether a song is likely to become an earworm, and how features of earworm songs impact our everyday moods and activities. Beyond the conception of earworms an “uninvited visitors” in our minds, recent research has also begun to reveal how earworms might play a functional role in our lives, providing new insights into how inner music interacts with other cognitive processes like memory, attention, and emotion.
