Get that song out of your head

It can strike at any moment and in an instant, your whole day can change. A snippet of some song suddenly gets stuck in your head and you’re powerless to shake it off.

The elusive earworm is at once one of life’s great mysteries and most common nuisances.

At least part of the mystery is that the worm is not particularly attuned to the Top 40 charts. Its victims are just as likely to have the rather tuneless “Here we go, Oilers; here we go” suddenly popping into their heads — a little plaintively these days, we might add — as they are ABBA’s Dancing Queen, or Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe, or anything by Lady Gaga.

What triggers this phenomenon isn’t always obvious. Neuropsychology research at Universite de Montreal a few years back established that earworms tend to affect people who are in a positive state of mind.

It comes as some surprise, then, that the common blue funk isn’t among the newly prescribed cures for those catchy tunes that burrow into our brains and keep hitting the repeat button.

A team of researchers from Western Washington University this week reported that the best way to attack an earworm is “cognitive engagement” in the form of anagrams, stimulating conversation and, heavens be praised, reading.

The study published in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology says the trick is finding just the right balance, sort of a Goldilocks effect of concentrated engagement — not too difficult and not too easy, to keep those irritating melodies from wiggling their way back into your consciousness. A good novel might be in order, then, but perhaps not War and Peace. Why, your daily newspaper could be just the ticket.

Dr. Ira Hyman, the psychology professor who headed the study, hopes the research will pave the way for more information on how to stop other intrusive thoughts that are obsessive and anxiety- provoking in nature.

Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote an entire book on the subject a few years back, noting that even in aging brains beset by growing gaps, familiar music lingers.

“The past which is not recoverable in any other way seems to be sort of embedded in amber, if you will, in music,” Sacks wrote in Musicophilia.

The trouble is, it’s entirely up to the earworm to make selections from the massive musical repertoire in a person’s head.