Ed Jones / AFP-Getty Images file

As the drums beat at machine gun speed and the guitars shred lightning fast, dozens of moshers flock to the center of the room and slam into one another. It looks like chaos as their bodies collide madly. 

Like others, Jesse Silverberg believed that mosh and circle pits were random groups of people dancing wildly (and a bit violently). But five years ago, he took his girlfriend to her first (and last) heavy metal concert. Instead of jumping into the mosh pit at the In Flames show, he stayed with her on the outskirts. As the band played louder and the moshers presumably got drunker, Silverberg observed a pattern. One person would bump into another and the movement would ripple across the mosh pit.

“The collision went from one side to the other,” he says, adding it looked like moshers followed the rules of collective motion. “I had a hard time focusing on the music for the rest of the evening.”

Several years later in a statistical mechanics class with James Sethna, professor of physics at Cornell, Silverberg recalled the ripple-like movement in the mosh pit and thought studying it might make an interesting experiment. With the help of a fellow graduate student, Matt Bierbaum, Silverberg examined whether humans in mosh pits and circle pits truly followed the rules of collective motion, which describes phenomena such as flocking as seen with birds or schools of fish. (In mosh pits, people bounce off one another and in circle pits they rush around in a circular motion.)

They watched and analyzed about 100 videos from YouTube of people participating in either mosh or circle pits.   

“I watched with pleasure,” says Silverberg. When he examined the dancers in mosh pits he realized that they behaved like gas particles bouncing around in the air in unpredictable ways. People in circle pits, on the other hand, dance in an ordered pattern, like flocks of migrating birds.

In addition to watching YouTube videos, the researchers used a computer simulation that measures collective behavior to see how moshers act. In the simulation, they created a fake concert venue and added a few conditions and Mobile Active Simulated Humanoids (what they call MASHers) —solid objects to resemble humans that enjoy dancing wildly to resemble moshers—to mimic real life concerts.

“If you just distribute the MASHers in the crowd they will [gravitate toward each other and begin moshing],” explains Bierbaum.   

One MASHer follows the behavior of the neighboring MASHer, moving collectively, which is exactly what happens to moshers. “You can mix a bunch of people who want to dance wildly and people who do not [throughout the room] and the moshers end up in the center,” says Sethna.

Silverberg believes that understanding collective motion of moshers helps experts understand how people behave in emergencies such as fires or riots. Researchers can’t put people in a dangerous situation to learn how they evacuate in a panic. When they try simulating such events with the participants’ knowledge, people file out calmly, which is certainly not how they act in emergencies. 

“Mosh pits become a lens to look into extreme situations,” explains Silverberg, who funded the study himself (read: he bought all his own concert tickets).

The paper has been submitted for publication, but is available as a preprint online. 

Related: 

Why the whole bar sings along to certain songs

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Although it seems maddeningly impossible, new research suggests we really can get rid of that nagging tune that endlessly plays over and over again in our head.  

For those of you who had Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” in your head for most of 2012, or haven’t been able to stop your brain from playing “Master of the House” since seeing “Les Miserables” over the holidays, you’ll want to take note.

The trick is this: We can banish earworms from our brains by engaging in an absorbing task – something that is not too easy, but not too difficult, either.

Known as earworms, those songs that just won’t go away are a common type of intrusive thought, according to Ira Hyman, professor of psychology at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash. Hyman and his research team conducted a series of experiments focused on learning more about why the earworm phenomenon and other intrusive thoughts are so persistent as well as what types of cognitive activities may help interrupt them.  Their research is published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. 

“We first did a general survey and asked people about their most recent experience with an intrusive song and found that the vast majority actually liked the songs that were in their heads,” Hyman told NBCNews.com.  The most repetitive songs were those that were well liked or popular at the time of the survey. 

The initial survey included about 300 participants of various age groups.  The other four studies included several hundred undergraduate college students. 

Hyman isn’t sure yet exactly what cognitive mechanism causes certain songs to stick, but he also found that once an earworm finds a home in the brain, it just seems to stay there. 

“After a while, it feels like it’s gone from conscious awareness, but suddenly, it’s back in there again.  It’s almost waiting in the wings of consciousness for the stage in your mind to empty,” Hyman explained. 

Earworms are more likely to wriggle in when people are bored or engaged in activities that are either somewhat mindless or very complicated.

“If you’re doing something that’s really automatic, such as walking or riding a bike, and there’s a lot of room for a song to play in your head, it will probably come back,” he said.

At the other extreme, performing a complex task that may be too difficult to complete may also leave more room for the earworm to wiggle its way in.

Study subjects attempted puzzles of varying complexity, and those who worked on more difficult ones reported experiencing the earworm phenomenon more frequently. 

“You want to find the point at which you’re pretty engaged in a task so there’s not much room or consciousness for music to be playing in your head,” Hyman suggested.  

The earworm-busting activity would be different for different people, Hyman explains. "For some people, it may be to read a book, or play a video game, or getting engaged in sports," he says. "It has to be something that fully engages the consciousness for that person."

But here's the bad news: “There’s a good chance it will disappear, but it may come back later,” he says. And if it does, Hyman has another suggestion.

“Listen to something else,” he said.

Related:

• Why you can't get 'Call Me Maybe' out of your head
• 4 reasons a song gets stuck in your head

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It’s nearing 1 a.m. The lights are dim in the bar and the opening riffs of Queen’s “We are the Champions” blare from the stereo. Suddenly, it seems like everyone in the bar is singing, “We are the champions, my friends, and we’ll keep on fighting, till the end …” 

“I was out on a night out and I saw [several] groups sort of huddled together belting out songs at the top of their lungs. And I was blown away by the all enthusiasm and vigor,” says Alisun Pawley, a musicologist and lecturer at Kendal College in England.

“It had a tribal quality. What is it about this song?” 

To understand why people croon in bars, Pawley visited pubs and clubs in several towns in Northern England. Over 30 days, she recorded 1,110 songs, played throughout the evening. In addition to capturing the song, she noted what lyrics roused the crowd and estimated the number of people singing when the tune reached its climax. 

She and a colleague, Daniel Müllensiefen, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, analyzed the most popular songs to see if they shared any particular similarities. 

Paul McCartney leads athletes and audience members in what amounted to one massive sing-a-long to the Beatles song

“We looked at various aspects from their melodic aspects, the range, the intervals between notes -- I thought that maybe if [the intervals] weren’t as far apart it would be easier to sing, [but] that wasn’t influential,” she says. “We looked at the aspect of the lyrics and how relevant they were in the context of a pub.”

Pawley found that pub-goers most enjoyed crooning high-energy songs sung by male vocalists with high chest voices and fewer warbles (these qualities describe something known as an anthemic vocal performance). All the popular songs spent at least four weeks on the UK music charts. Crowds that engaged in sing-a-longs were normally younger and the later it was, the more likely it was they would sing.      

“The later on in the evening, the more people sang along and we largely relate that to alcohol,” she says. 

While Pawley thought that songs with nonsense words such as “Hey Jude,” with its "nah, nah, nah, nah" would be more popular, she found nonsense words didn’t add a song’s appeal. (“Hey Jude” united the world in a sing-a-long during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, which Pawley says was “just brilliant.” She believes the song was a hit with an international crowd because non-English speakers don’t need to understand nah to enjoy it.)

People gravitated toward songs with some cultural significance. Even if “YMCA” isn’t on a personal favorite, people know the words and it’s a mainstay at festive events.

“Songs have kind of a tradition about them and very new songs haven’t necessarily built a culture.”

She hopes to conduct similar research in the United States. She suspects the songs might have different titles, but will share the same musical properties. 

The article will be published in the journal Music Perception later this year.

Top 10 pub songs in England:

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After suffering a brain hemorrhage, 7-year-old Charlotte Neve slipped into a coma. The British girl was unconscious for several days and doctors feared she wouldn’t recover. Her mother, Leila Neve, was at her bedside when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” started playing on the radio. Leila and Charlotte often sang the song together and Leila began singing along.

Then something remarkable happened: Charlotte smiled. Within two days, she could speak and get out of bed. Why does music seem to help "awaken" some people from their comas?

“It was a salient stimulus, something that she is familiar with, like [her] name,” says Dr. Emery Neal Brown, professor of anesthesia at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and professor of computational neuroscience at MIT.

Brown suspects Charlotte recovered some brain functioning prior to hearing the Adele song, but it was imperceptible. When she heard the song, she smiled and eventually woke because it held meaning for her (that's the salient stimulus part).  

“Maybe people have function recovered and we don’t know how to communicate with them,” he says, explaining a salient stimulus varies by person.

“Whenever memories have an emotional context to them, they tend to hold much more power in the brain and tend to be processed differently,” says Dr. Javier Provencio, director of the Neurological Critical Care Unit at Cleveland Clinic.

Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees woke from his coma when his family played music for him — music for a professional musician who sang with his brothers would have deep meaningful connections in the brain, sparking a reaction. But for someone who plays tennis or rides horses, a song might not encourage a response. 

But sometimes, music causes a reaction because the brain processes songs differently than spoken language. In these cases, the region of the brain responsible for song might be working better while the language lags behind.

“We clearly process music and tonal things differently than language. There are patients [who had strokes] who cannot talk but can still sing,” says Provencio.

The left cerebral hemisphere controls language, while the right processes song and music. Patients who have damage in the left might respond better to song.

“They lose the ability to talk and understand. Music therapy is really useful because it is used in the non-dominate hemisphere,” says Dr. James Bernat, professor of neurology and medicine at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.

Music therapists such as Lee Anna Rasar at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire often use music to try to evoke responses from comatose patients. She notes that songs are most effective “if the music is something they knew before that already had meaning.”

All the physicians agree that doctors still have limited understanding of whether someone will recover from a coma, but if Charlotte wasn’t already healing, she wouldn’t have smiled at the song.

“Even in a coma, it’s quite common that these people improve spontaneously,” says Bernat. “They wake up and start responding. It isn’t outside the range of what is expected that there would be improvement over time.”

Related:

• Adele song wakes girl from coma
• You will never get 'Call Me Maybe' out of your head
• Can't carry a tune? You may be amusic

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Reuters file photo

Singer Carly Rae Jepsen just met you. And this is crazy. But here she is singing at the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto on Sunday, so call her, maybe?

It seems impossible to hide from Carly Rae Jepsen's “Call Me Maybe.” Someone auto-tuned videos of President Obama so he performs it; The Roots and Jimmy Fallon played it with toy musical instruments; the Harvard baseball team, the Southern Methodist University women’s rowing team, and the Miami Dolphin cheerleaders all danced to the ditty; and the bubble gum pop song has taken over all the airwaves.

And maybe your brainwaves -- does it seem like “Call Me Maybe” is on repeat in your head? You’re not alone; you have an earworm. Earworms, or involuntary imagery of music, burrow their way into the subconscious, making a home in the brain. And "Call Me Maybe" is arguably the earwormiest song in recent memory. 

“Earworms is a colloquial name for a phenomena in music psychology—an experience when you get a song or a piece of song such as chorus [stuck in your head] without a willing attempt to experience a musical memory,” says Lassi A. Liikkanen, who published two papers about earworms recently in the journals Psychology of Music and Musicae Scientiae.   

People frequently experience earworms after hearing a new songs and recognizing a few snippets of lyrics and melody.  

“Involuntary imagery of music is based on our skill to remember music, but for some reason feels out of control. But is perfectly normal,” explains, Liikkanen, a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT in Finland.

Songs such as “Call Me Maybe” or fun's “We Are Young” seem to pop into our brains against our will. Seeing an album cover or recalling a memory associated with a song can induce an earworm. Liikkanen, who surveyed more than 12,000 Finish Internet users about earworms, found that nearly 90 percent of people experience involuntary imagery of music.

“Some times these involuntary music experiences are tied to a life experience and it is congruent with mood,” he says. “Even if you haven’t heard a song for weeks, months, decades [hearing the song sparks] a key memory.”

He discovered that women catch earworms more than men and younger generations have the bug more frequently than older folks. While there is little evidence about why these differences occur, Liikkanen has a few theories.

Women might be more attuned to their mental lives, possibly connecting songs with meaningful moments more frequently. When it comes to earworms and older people, it seems that older folks listen to music less and might not have as great of memory retention as they once had.

In general, people who play or write music hear earworms more than those simple music listeners.

“A lot of the great composers claim they were hearing the music in their heads … it happens with the not so [great] composers,” Liikkanen says. While the more musical education one has the more involuntary imagery of music occurs at some point it evens out—people with the highest levels of music education reported fewer recurrent earworms.

Those with a form of OCD might hear earworms an excessive amount and people suffering auditory hallucinations sometimes also hear snippets of songs repeatedly. In these cases, Liikkanen says people should consult a psychiatrist for treatment.

“People consider [earworms] entertaining and fun occasions when they emerge,” he says. “Music is wonderfully complicated in human psychology.”  

Dying to extract "Call Me Maybe" from your brain? It's not so simple. Liikkanen suggests avoiding all music and cues connected with the song. Cues can be as seemingly insignificant as hearing the title of the song or the artist's name -- so you'll need a moratorium on anything beginning with the words "call me." Good luck with that. 

You can enable the Earworm Clinic application on Facebook to learn more about your earworms and provide information for Liikkanen. 

Related:

• Can't carry a tune to save your life? You may be amusic
• Shriek, sob, swoon: What causes Bieber fever?

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“I know only two tunes: one of them is ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and the other isn’t,” quipped Ulysses S. Grant. Grant famously disdained military music and many speculate that the 18th President of the United States suffered from tone-deafness or amusia.

“Amusia is a general term that applies to a group of musical deficits,” says Daniel J. Levitin, James McGill Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal. 

Tone-deafness and amusia remain misunderstood. Bad singers could be one of four types—people unable to hear pitch; people who can’t capture rhythm; people who sing in a monotone; and people with voices that others don’t prefer, says Levitin. He peppers his explanation with song, singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” monotonically then performing it as if he is Bob Dylan (he does a pretty passable impression!).   

 “[Dylan] actually hits all the pitches, he is very precise; he has an unusual voice,” Levitin says. Critics call Dylan tone deaf simply because they dislike his voice.

Being a bad vocalist does not mean one is truly amusic. Being amusic means a person lacks musical ability; she might not be able to distinguish pitch or create different sounds.

“Normal people have some musical ability—if I play you a piece of music and I miss a note, you would know something wrong with that. Amusics can’t [tell],” says Psyche Loui, a neurology instructor at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston. “The main compliant is that they cannot sing in tune.”

Anywhere from 4 to 9 percent of the population suffers from amusia. It’s difficult to obtain solid estimates because people dubbed tone-deaf earn the distinction because of terrible singing, not because they have been tested for amusia. (And these are real tests, including this one from the Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory, where Loui works http://musicianbrain.com/pitchtest/).

Loui says experts remain unsure about what causes amusia, but most believe a combination of environmental and genetic factors lead to disruptions in the brain, contributing to “unawareness and poor memory for sounds, especially pitches.”

Being amusic makes life tricky (and not just for those who suffer through a screeching rendition of “Call Me Maybe” at karaoke).

Many Asian and African languages are tonal and one word possesses different meanings based on how it’s pronounced. Loui, whose native language is Cantonese, provides an example. If she says ‘ma’ one way it means mother, if she says it with different inflection it means horse. Amusics who speak tonal languages are often unfairly pegged as having learning disabilities.

“If you cannot perceive tone, you can’t produce it,” says Loui.

In most languages, being unable to understand inflection or pitch can lead to misunderstandings, says Levitin. “A lot of emotion and intention is conveyed by tone,” he says.

People understand sarcasm because they hear the tone. For a person unable to discern such nuances, a conversation can be confusing.  

“[Amusia] is definitely a real phenomena and has neural underpinnings,” says Loui.

Related:

• Elvis song may reveal clues to genetic disorder
• Sounds delicious! New study shows link between pitch and flavor
• 4 reasons a song gets stuck in your head

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Do you think pinot grigio “smells” like a note from a clarinet? Does the sound of a bass “taste” like a dark red Barolo?

If so, you are using “crossmodal” associations, drawing on analogies from various senses in order to create a picture of the world. And you’re not odd. A new study from Oxford University scientists shows that taste and sound are intimately linked.  

An extreme form of this phenomenon is synesthesia, a condition in which one might see the number 8 as red, for example. But most people make such crossmodal associations all the time without giving it much thought.

Hear something in that wine? A new study shows a "crossmodal" link between taste and pitch.

Imagine yourself on one side of a small hill when suddenly you hear a very loud, deep-toned thump coming from the other side. Your brain instantly assembles a picture of the shape and size of the object that made that sound – Baltimore Ravens tackle Bryant McKinnie (6 feet 8 inches tall,  360 pounds) stamping his feet, say.

This ability is a survival tool, Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new study said. “People learn the statistics of their environment and any statistical regularity between cross-sensory features of that environment,” he explained. Knowing that big objects almost always make low-pitch sounds, “helps you predict the future and hence respond more rapidly.” Even if you can’t see the possible predator around the bend, you “hear” his size.

Until now, a crossmodal link between taste and pitch hadn’t been scientifically validated. So Spence and Ph.D student Anne-Sylvie Crisinel used a commercially available aroma kit designed to train amateurs in the fine art of wine description to prove that aromas evoke musical tones.

Thirty people sniffed various samples (like almond, apple, smoked, hay, cedar, caramel). Then they had to choose from a standard database of notes played by four types of instruments (piano, strings, woodwind, brass) in a range of pitch. A subset of the test participants were blindfolded because darker colors tend to be associated with lower pitch, and since some of the odor samples had a dark color, they didn’t want to screen for visual bias.

Blindfolded or not, significant associations emerged. Few subjects linked brass with blackberry, for example, but many associated it with piano. Hardly anybody connected piano with musk, but many linked it to brass. Fruit odors were consistently associated with high pitched notes. That confirmed an earlier study by Crisinel and Spence showing that sweet and sour flavors were also associated with high pitched notes. 

This effect apparently works the other way, too. Another scientist recently asked different musicians to play pieces of music with adjectives like “bitter,” “salty” and “sweet” in mind. Though the musicians could play whatever they wanted, consistent patterns emerged.

Business has taken notice. According to Spence, “there is a growing field of synesthetic marketing where people try to use such cross-sensory mappings to capture the multisensory attributes of their product or brand, like the fragrance or taste, through the use of appropriate sounds and visuals in TV or radio adverts.” Some restaurants already use music in an attempt to boost the liking and intensity of the flavors of the food they serve, he said.

So the next time you’re shopping for wine, and see a description saying “notes of deep-forest woodiness,” you can decide if you really feel like tasting Beethoven’s Fifth.

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The hand you use to write, brush your teeth, and throw a ball may also tip people off to your taste in music, a new study reveals.

An Ohio researcher has found that people with a strong preference for using their right hand for most everything they do, seem to like popular types of music and tend to shy away from less familiar genres, especially bluegrass and reggae.

Strong righties, the study suggests, may be less open to new musical experiences and tend to gravitate toward styles they're more familiar with.

The research also found that people who are mixed-handed, meaning they use their non-dominant hand for at least two activities but it does not mean ambidextrous, reported broader musical interests. They showed greater "open-earedness," or a stronger liking of unpopular musical styles and more willingness to listen to them.

Many factors influence our music preferences, so why would hand choice matter? In part, it's affected by what's happening between the ears -- in the brain.

"Mixed-handers are more 'in touch' with a wide variety of right hemisphere processes," says study author Stephen Christman, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. The right hemisphere of the brain plays a key role in updating thoughts and beliefs and in allowing us to see things in new ways, he explains, while the left hemisphere tends to stick with the tried and true.

Christman notes that about 80 percent of left-handers are mixed-handers while about 60 percent of righties are strong-handed.

The study, published in the journal Psychology of Music, looked at 92 college students who completed a hand preference survey. Forty-nine students were strong right-handers and 43 were mixed-handed.

Four participants were strongly left-handed, too small a group for statistical analysis. But  other studies have found that the taste preferences of strong left-handers tend to resemble strong right-handers more than mixed-handers.

Students were asked to rate how often they listened to 21 different musical genres and their enjoyment of them. Nine were considered "popular" based on recording industry sales figures and the rest were "unpopular." Popular categories included classic rock, heavy metal, country and rap/hip-hop. Unpopular genres ranged from jazz and world to folk and reggae.

The top three musical choices of strong right-handers were R&B, modern pop and alternative rock; mixed-handers favored R&B followed by alternative rock and modern rock.

Although this study looked at college students, Christman suspects his findings would still apply to middle-age and older adults. He says "many of our enduring musical preferences are formed during our high school and college years, and they persist into adulthood."

Still, those interests can expand. Christman advises strong-handed people to keep exposing yourself to new forms of music and listening to unfamiliar genres. "Give the music a little time, and you may find yourself developing a liking for it and rewarded by broader musical horizons."

That's what happened to him. Christman's musical tastes have long favored acoustic/folk-based genres. But when his daughter started bringing home CDs by Eminem and Ludacris, the mixed-hander quickly developed an intense liking for rap and hip-hop.

What's been your experience? Are you right-handed, left-handed, mixed-handed? What kind of music is your favorite?

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Dave Hogan / MTV via Getty Images

Redfoo of LMFAO knows exactly what it takes to get a song permanently stuck in your head. Now, researchers are getting a clue, too.

When I take my early morning spinning classes, my weary brain is in a vulnerable state. Maybe that's one reason why the chorus of a particular tune, like LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem" or Katy Perry's "Firework," played during the workout gets trapped inside my head for the rest of the day -- and night -- and the next day. 

Known as earworms, these random snippets of songs or melodies pop into our minds repeating themselves again and again like a broken record. For me, another one was that silly jingle from the McDonald's filet-of-fish commercial, which undoubtedly would delight advertisers but I found both amusing and mildly annoying.

So it helps to know that earworms are an incredibly common experience: Studies suggest that 90 percent of people get them at least once a week. Over the last decade, researchers have spent time collecting data to learn who gets earworms, how often they occur, how long they last and which songs won't budge from our brains.

Now, a new British study in the journal Psychology of Music has tried to understand their origins. They looked at how earworms, which psychologists call involuntary musical imagery, get started in the first place.

Researchers collected data from 604 people who completed an online survey. After analyzing the responses, they identified four main triggers for earworms. The most common one was music exposure, either recently hearing a tune or repeatedly hearing it. A second reason was memory triggers, meaning that seeing a particular person or word, hearing a specific beat, or being in a certain situation reminds you of a song.

The third reason for earworms your emotional frame of mind, or "affective states."  Feeling stressed, surprised or happy when you hear a song may make it stick in your head. And a fourth cause was "low attention states."  A wandering mind, whether from daydreaming or dreams at night, can set off this involuntary musical imagery. 

"I was initially surprised by the sheer number of idiosyncrasies within the earworm surveys -- the number of different tunes people heard and the number of unique circumstances where earworms popped up," says study author, Victoria Williamson, a music psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London.

But it makes sense, she says, since "these spontaneous mental tunes appear to be a typical everyday consequence of the way that our brains process music."

And these "sticky songs" can be a tune you hear often or a brand new one. "Earworms are likely to be as individual as we are in both our musical tastes and music listening habits," explains Williamson.

Asked what to do when you get one, Williamson says she'll be trying to find out how people control them in her next research project." But in the meantime, she offers up this advice: "I find that occupying my mind with a task helps -- reading a book, doing a puzzle or talking to a friend."

What about you? Tell us what song has stuck in your head recently and what may have triggered it. 

Related:

• Song stuck in your head? You've got an earworm
• 'Come on, Irene'? Why we mishear song lyrics
• Blinded by the lyric? Study reveals why we get the words wrong

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The adolescent brain might not be such a teenage wasteland after all.

Recent research suggests that the activity in teen brains may have some Nostradamus-like qualities when it comes to predicting the hits or misses of popular music.

In a small study, scientists recruited 27 adolescents, ages 12 to 17. They asked each kid to listen to 60 15-second clips of songs from largely unknown artists found on MySpace. The clip included either the hook or chorus of each song, and volunteers only listened to tunes from their three favorite musical categories, which ranged from country, rock and indie to hip-hop, blues and metal.

Researchers recorded the teens' reactions to each song using brain-imaging scans, and they also asked participants to rate how much they liked the music on a scale of one to five stars. By using unfamiliar musicians and vocals, scientists hoped to get a raw response, as if teens were hearing the track for the first time.

For three years after the scanning took place, the scientists gathered data on each song's sales figures to see which ones were fan faves or flops.

Although the teens' tastes in music from their likability ratings showed no link to a song's commercial success, their brain scans told another story: Activity in the ventral striatum -- the brain's reward region -- was predictive of future sales figures and popularity.

"We found that when an area of the brain associated with reward and anticipation was active while listening to the song, chances were greater that the song would eventually go on to sell more than 20,000 units," says Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, a neuroeconomist and director of Emory University's Center for Neuropolicy.

While the teens brains displayed a modest knack for picking out songs that would sell at least 20,000 units -- about one-third of the brain images could predict this -- they were even more accurate at identifying failures: Nearly 90 percent of the songs that showed a weak response in the brain's reward region had tepid sales.

Most of the study songs were duds with dismal sales, but three were industry hits (500,000 units sold) including "Apologize" by OneRepublic and two country cuts, "Don't Laugh at Me" by Mark Wills and "Drink, Swear, Steal, and Lie" by Michael Peterson. But none of these tunes were in the teens' top 10 in eliciting brain activation so they weren't exactly hit-predicting machines.

"The fact that there was any predictive power at all was surprising," says Berns, the study's lead author. "There are so many songs released each year and so few hits, that the odds were stacked against us."

The study appears in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.

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