can’t get rid of them<\/em>. (No, I’m not going to mention a song about very young scary fish that have huge teeth and eat seals and occasionally terroize people. “Doo doo doo doo doo doo.”)<\/p>\nWhat effect do earworms have on sleep?<\/p>\n
Questions and Answers<\/h2>\n
Research into sleep can get quite technical. We start talking about “spindle detection” and “polysomnography” and “frontal slow oscillation activity.”<\/p>\n
Rather than go into the details, I’ll offer a quick summary of the conclusions:<\/p>\n
First<\/strong>: survey results suggest that most people (87%!) think that listening to music will improve sleep (or, at least, not harm it).<\/p>\nHowever — a big however — people who reported listening to relatively more music<\/em> also report relatively lower sleep quality<\/em>.<\/p>\nSecond<\/strong>: the same survey results suggest that “earworms” make up a big part of this problem.<\/p>\nThat is: the more music I listen to, the more earworms I experience. And, the more earworms I experience, the worse I sleep.<\/p>\n
YIKES.<\/p>\n
Third<\/strong>: you might think that music with lyrics<\/em> results in more earworms than music without lyrics<\/em>. Scullin’s team, in fact, thinks that’s the “intuitive view.”<\/p>\nWell, as so often happens, our intuitions are wrong.<\/p>\n
Believe it or not, people who listen to instrumental versions of popular songs have more earworms — and worse sleep — than those who listen to the songs themelves.<\/p>\n
So, What To Do?<\/h2>\n
What advice should we be giving students about sleep — other than, “get at least 8 hours”?<\/p>\n
Scullin’s team sums up their study this way:<\/p>\n
There are few behaviors as prevalent\u00a0in young adults as listening to music, and many regularly\u00a0listen to music as part of their bedtime routine.\u00a0Listening to music feels relaxing, but familiar and repetitive\u00a0music can trigger involuntary musical imagery that\u00a0worsens sleep quality and daytime functioning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In other words: to reduce<\/em> earworms and sleep better<\/em>, don’t listen to music before going to sleep. And, instrumental versions of popular songs seem to be especially likely to generate earworms.<\/p>\nI can’t believe I’m typing this, but: Listener beware!<\/p>\n
\n* When students say to me, “I can’t sleep, I have too much homework,” I say, “Let’s think about this:<\/p>\n
‘Homework’ is anything that helps you learn more.<\/p>\n
Sleep helps you learn more.<\/p>\n
Therefore,\u00a0sleep is homework<\/em>.<\/p>\nDo your sleep homework, and you will learn more.”<\/p>\n
\nScullin, M. K., Gao, C., & Fillmore, P. (2021). Bedtime music, involuntary musical imagery, and sleep.\u00a0Psychological Science<\/i>,\u00a032<\/i>(7), 985-997.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just last week, I spoke with middle- and upper-school students about learning. We all know — and these students certainly know — that\u00a0learning is hard.\u00a0So, does cognitive science have any practical suggestions to help them study and learn? Yes, reader, it does. We know that retrieval practice helps learning much more than simple review. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6815,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[87,10],"class_list":["post-6814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-music","tag-sleep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6818,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6814\/revisions\/6818"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a><\/p>\n