Tune stuck in your head? Get to chewing

Tune+stuck+in+your+head%3F+Get+to+chewing

Courtesy of Morguefile

Tune stuck in your head? Get to chewing

Eric Wirth

Having a song stuck in your head can go from enjoyable to annoying and distracting very quickly. Scientists have found a potential antidote to tunes trapped in your head, and it only costs about 35 cents a pack.

According to an article published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, the act of chewing gum reduces the frequency of a catchy song being stuck in one’s head by nearly a third. 

The experiment, which used 98 participants, looked at three groups who either chewed gum, did nothing, or tapped their fingers after listening to “Payphone” by Maroon 5 and “Play Hard” by David Guetta.

This experiment was not the first to find a correlation between jaw movement and reducing short term memory and sound imagining ability. Most notably, one other experiment was done in 2012 by Michail D. Kozlov and his partners.

So, the next time a song gets stuck in your head, reach for your favorite flavor of gum and let your brain tell those pesky tunes, “Can’t touch this”.