Your Brain Is Playing a Song Right Now and You Did Not Ask for This

You were just frying plantain. Minding your own business. Not a single thought in your head except maybe whether the oil was hot enough. And then, from absolutely nowhere, that one Shatta Wale song you heard at your cousin's wedding two years ago showed up uninvited and started playing on full volume inside your skull.

You tried to ignore it. It got louder. You hummed it out loud. It did not help. You are now, against your will, a one-person sound system.

Congratulations. You have an earworm. And your brain did this to you completely on purpose.

You are not the only one suffering

Research shows that more than 90% of people get earworms at least once a week. About 60% get them daily. A study in the US found that nearly 98% of people have experienced them at some point in their lives.

So if you have ever felt slightly unwell for having a Stonebwoy chorus looping in your head at midnight when you are supposed to be sleeping, please know you are in excellent company. Almost every human being on earth has been there. Your brain does this to everyone. It is not because you listened to too much radio on the trotro. It is just how the brain works.

What is actually going on up there?

Scientists call earworms "involuntary musical imagery." Which is a very technical way of saying: music your brain is playing without asking you first.

The word "involuntary" is doing a lot of work there. You are not choosing to replay the hook of a song you do not even particularly like. Your brain is doing it to you. And understanding why it does this tells you something genuinely interesting about how the brain is built.

Your brain loves a good pattern

At its core, your brain is a pattern-recognition machine. It is always looking for sequences, predicting what comes next, and trying to complete things that feel unfinished. Music, especially the kind that dominates Ghanaian airwaves, exploits all three of these tendencies with total precision.

Think about the structure of a typical Afrobeats or highlife song. There is a hook that repeats. A rhythm your body wants to move to before your brain has even processed the lyrics. A melody that goes just far enough before coming back to the familiar part. That structure is not an accident. It is exactly the kind of pattern your brain finds irresistible.

When you hear a fragment of one of these songs, your brain encodes it. And then, like a tongue finding a gap where a tooth used to be, it keeps going back. It cannot help itself. It is trying to complete the pattern.

The most dangerous feature of all, according to researchers, is what they call "contiguous repetition." That is just a fancy way of saying a part of the song that repeats immediately, without a break. The "ei ei ei" in a dancehall hook. The repeating line in a gospel chorus. The "shayo" chant that half of Accra was singing at once in 2022. Your brain hears it, locks it in, and then plays it back indefinitely whether you consented or not.

Blame your idle brain

Earworms are far more likely to show up when you are not actively thinking about something. That means the commute on the trotro, the queue at the bank, the walk from the car park to the office, the frying of the plantain.

When your brain is not occupied with a task, it wanders. And apparently, part of what it does while wandering is play DJ. The auditory cortex, the region that processes sound, stays active even when you are only imagining music. Brain scans show that actually listening to a song and mentally replaying it look almost identical. Your brain does not really know the difference between music it is hearing and music it is remembering.

So when a song gets into the right neural groove, your brain replays it with the same commitment it would give to actually hearing it. With full production. Background harmonies included.

Why that specific song though?

This is where it gets interesting. Earworms almost always have a trigger, even when it does not feel that way.

Maybe someone used a phrase that sounded like a lyric. Maybe the rhythm of what you were doing matched the tempo of the song. Maybe you heard it at a specific moment that your brain filed away with emotional significance. The brain links music to memory, context, and emotion in extraordinarily particular ways.

A song you heard at a funeral, a wedding, a graduation, a late night at Republic Bar, a road trip to Kumasi, is far more likely to come back because it has so many things attached to it in your memory. The more emotionally significant a song, and the more recently or often you have heard it, the higher its earworm potential.

This is also why Ghanaian December is genuinely dangerous for earworms. You spend a month surrounded by the same Detty December playlist everywhere you go. By January, those songs are not just in your head. They have moved in and are refusing to leave.

How do you get rid of one?

Ah. The question everyone asks. The honest answer is: with difficulty, and no single method works for everyone.

Some research suggests listening to the full song can help, since it gives your brain the resolution it was looking for and allows the loop to properly close. Others find that engaging in a task that requires real concentration pushes the earworm out, because the brain simply does not have room for both at once.

Chewing gum has also shown up in a few studies as surprisingly effective, possibly because the jaw movement uses some of the same mental resources the earworm is borrowing. Whether this means you should carry Wrigley's specifically as a neurological defence mechanism is a decision only you can make.

The worst thing you can do is try very hard not to think about it. If you are now telling yourself "do not think about that Shatta Wale song," we are very sorry. You already know how this ends.

Here is the thing though

Earworms are, in a strange way, proof that your brain is working exactly as intended. The same pattern-completion system that traps a chorus in your head is the system that helps you learn language, recognise familiar faces, remember where you left your keys, and make sense of the world around you.

Your brain is not broken. It is just, occasionally, a little too enthusiastic about its job.

And on that note, we sincerely apologise, because you almost certainly have a song in your head right now. We hope it is one of the good ones. We hope it is not Baby Shark.

Sources: ScienceAlert (2025); University of New South Wales (2025); University of Cincinnati, Prevention (2024); Brain Facts, Society for Neuroscience (2025).