As I’m folding laundry in the bedroom, daydreaming about bike rides, late-night swims, and long summer hikes, I hear my 11-year-old son singing in the shower 20 feet away.

“I tried so hard and got so far. But in the end, it doesn’t even matter.” And just like that, I know I’ll be singing the same refrain, maybe all week.

Experts say those few seconds of Linkin Park’s popular hit can trigger a mind trip lasting hours or even days. Fragments of a song or jingles wind up playing on repeat in your head. And as you may be aware, these “earworms” are shockingly common. According to a 2020 study of American college students, 97 percent experienced an earworm in the past month. Some tunes (“Baby Shark,” we’re looking at you!) crawl into your mind even without any audible stimuli.

“Earworms are a universal phenomenon across many different ages and cultures,” says Claire Arthur, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Music in Atlanta. “But what distinguishes an earworm from any other memory that spontaneously pops into your head is that it recurs and repeats, often in a direct loop.”

Desperate to get “In the End” out of my head, I started watching Try Not to Laugh memes on YouTube. After one or two clips, my earworm was gone. It turns out, I’d unknowingly resorted to one of many tactics experts recommend to exterminate an earworm. These enigmatic tunes hook into our minds easily, but fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to eliminate the loop of lunacy.

Scientists aren’t entirely sure why we get songs in our head, but they suspect that something about the mental architecture of our brains allows musical patterns to emerge and play over and over. Studies, like this one published in the journal Psychology of Music, show that earworms typically occur in response to a few basic triggers: recency, familiarity, and boredom.

“Our brain is made up of a massive complex network of neurons that store information, and when the mind is free to wander, it may unwittingly land on a song that has been encoded through recency and repetition,” says Emery Schubert, a researcher and professor at the University of New South Wales. “In fact, composers and artists who write songs intentionally build repetition into their music to boost the odds of creating an earworm.”

Scientists call earworms involuntary musical imagery, or INMI, because they burrow into our heads uninvited and without warning. At our house, we leave a local alternative-music radio station on in the background. The DJs favor a song called “Heatwaves,” by Glass Animals. Let’s just say I’m not a fan, and yet, that’s the song that frequently plays in my mind when I awaken from a dreamlike state: “Sometimes, all I think about is you. Late nights in the middle of June. Heat waves been fakin' me out. Can't make you happier now.” And I know I’ll be singing those few catchy lines while I’m brushing my teeth later that night.