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It's similar to one of those muscle spasms or twitches you get once in a while. You know how annoying they are and how little you can do to stop them. Unrelenting tunes in the head happen for similar reasons. Just as your muscles are controlled by nerves, everything within the mind also corresponds to neurological activity, and this includes mental simulations of music.
In the last five years, earworms have become the subject of peer-reviewed scientific studies. In 2006, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University even studied his own earworms and observed in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that they could be used as a basis for understanding how conscious experience can be split into multiple parallel streams. In 2008, moreover, Finnish researchers published a study that used the Interrnet to survey age, gender, personality and musical and linguistic competence of 12,420 countrymen who experienced the endless loops in their heads.