Have you ever tried hearing a song and it got stuck in your head the whole day? Some people enjoy it but others want it out of there immediately. Well, a new study says that there is a simple but effective way to cure the 'last song syndrome'. Just chew gum.
In the new study published in in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers from the University of Reading found out that chewing gum after listening to a catchy song were less likely to think about the song, Tech Times reported.
Dr. Philipi Beaman, the lead researcher of the study, said that chewing gum led to a third of the participants not continuing to hear the songs played for them. "The majority of us experience them for only short periods but others can experience them for two or three days which can be extremely frustrating and debilitating. We wanted to explore whether a simple act like chewing gum could help," he added.
To land to their findings, they enrolled 98 participants and they were asked to listen to catchy songs like 'Payphone' by Maroon 5 and 'Play Hard' by David Guetta. There were three initial experiments, 40 students were initially asked to listen to the first 30 seconds of the song 'Play Hard' twice and they were told to think about anything they liked except the song for three minutes.
However, whenever they would think about the song, they were asked to press the 'q' key in the keyboard. After that, the succeeding three minutes were allotted for them to think about anything they liked including the song and they were again asked to press the key 'q'.
They were asked to do the test twice, once with no gum and the other, chewing a gum. They found out that when the students had the song in their mind for about nine times during the first three minutes and 10 times on the second test. However, when they were asked to chew gum, it was reduced to just six times for both tests, the LA Times reports.
Beaman explains that this type of activity may help in preventing 'earworms'. However, further studies are recommended to see if chewing gum may help people with obsessive-compulsive disorders.