I might owe some people an apology.  

I recently posted about a song from “Scrubs the Musical,” a television episode that aired a few weeks ago.  The title of this tune is presumably “Everything comes Down to Poo.”  It is a clever and funny tune, but it is also dangerous.

For me (hopefully not for you) that song morphed into an “earworm,” another name for a song that can get stuck in one’s head.  This crazy tune from Scrubs has been following me around relentlessly for the past two weeks.  It has sometimes been distractingly annoying during the day.  It even kept me awake one night last week.

What to do?  I just happen to be reading a cogsci/music book: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. Here’s what I learned from Levitin: There is relatively little scientific work done on the topic of earworms.  What is clear is that

musicians are more likely to have ear worm attacks than non-musicians, and . . . people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are more likely to report being troubled by ear worms—in some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects.

Hmmm . . . This makes me wonder whether Walgreens carries any over-the-counter medications for OCD . . .

Levitin suggests that the neural circuits representing a song somehow get stuck in “playback” mode, but usually only a small fragment of a song (15 to 30 seconds) is involved.  Ear worms are most likely “simple songs and commercial jingles.”…