Earworms on CNN
This week our earworms project received some fantastic new converage thanks to CNN online media. Talented writer Simon Hooper has composed an article about our progress as a team and he even includes some quotes from the band Squeeze (one of my favourites!). As if that wasn’t enough joy, there is even a picture of Paul McCartney in the headline – the inner Beatles fan in me squealed with delight upon seeing this additional visual!
The CNN piece can be found here: CNN on eaworms
It is really great to see that the work we are doing is inspiring so much interest. I hope that his new coverage leads many more people to visit our15 minute questionnaire at earwormery.com and to tell us about the music that gets stuck in their heads.
Why would you take the questionnaire? Although there is an interesting link with pop songs that is covered in this article, we are not interested in composing anything for the music industry – we are scientists and we want to study this phenomenon so we might better understand how our minds work. The more people take the survey the more likely it is we will be able to hunt down the causes of earworms. We want to know what purpose earworms might serve in everyday life and how we might better control them, and we aim to do this by better understanding who gets them and under what circumstances. We are also in a unique position to analyse the musical structure of earworm tunes themselves, and to learn about how and why certain musical features get stuck in our heads.
Taking a wider view, earworms are a uniquely powerful clue to how our unconscious minds work: Like the dark side of the moon and the deep ocean, the unconscious mind is a new hidden frontier of scientific research. The difference between earworms and the ocean/moon is that everyone can be involved in exploring the mind – all your unique experiences are invaluable to our research. Basically, your insights give us our direction. So huge thanks to everyone who has taken part so far. And for everyone else; we look forward to hearing from you soon! 🙂
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