It’s still hot, and that makes me more easily distracted.

In my office (when I’m there, which I’m not until the elevator replacement finishes), I keep the lights off and the door closed or only slightly ajar while I’m working to limit distractions (believe me, it’s hard to shut me up around people I know, and I will take every opportunity to procrastinate). At home or elsewhere, it’s much the same, though I generally don’t have to deal with people (Sarah and Charlie aren’t people; they’re family). I don’t have the TV or any music on because I’ll get caught up in whatever’s playing.

I discovered in grad school that if I listened to music when I studied, it had to be instrumental only, and usually classical (I retained more information with Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” for some reason; it’s been too long since I’ve listened to that). Though I would often hum parts of pieces I loved, it wasn’t as dangerous to my concentration as would be something from, say, The Who, The Doors, Queen, They Might Be Giants or other artists. They didn’t invite earworms. “Baba O’Riley,” “People Are Strange,” “We Are the Champions,” “Istanbul” and other such songs can totally wreck my concentration. (Yes, of course, I’m sharing the links to those videos! One of the best ways to get rid of earworms is to inflict them on someone else.)

And of course, the Word Nerd has to talk about the etymology of earworm because, well, it just makes her happy.

Merriam-Webster’s Words at Play blog notes, “‘Earworm’ is centuries old in English, but the word first referred to the earwig; later, it referred to a destructive pest known to infest ears of corn. Meanwhile, Germans started using the parallel word ‘Ohrwurm’ to refer to an infectious tune.”

In England and throughout Europe, there was a belief that earwigs (a type of insect) crawled into people’s ears (ewwww), which resulted in it being called an “earworm.” (Germans referred to earwigs as ohrwurm.) In the 19th century, the earwig meaning faded and earworm instead referred to a moth larva that burrowed into corn, tomatoes, tobacco and cotton bolls.

“Meanwhile, in Germany,” the blog wrote, “the parallel term ohrwurm still referred to the earwig, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s, those inventive Germans began applying the name for this pest which supposedly burrowed into your ear to a piece of music that wouldn’t get out of your head.

“We English speakers stumbled across this German use in the early 1980s and we fell in love with it. We took the meaning of Ohrwurm and applied it to the English word that matched the German one word for word: earworm. Though this use of earworm first showed up in English in the early 1980s, it was popularized by Stephen King.”

Like I need another reason to admire Stephen King. I still have such vivid images in my mind from reading “Firestarter,” “Misery,” and so many of his other novels and short story/novella collections, even not having read them in a while. The kind of writing that sticks with you (in a good way; I’m not the only one still struck by the writing in the “Incident at Manders Farm” chapter in “Firestarter”) is something so many aspire to, but most fall short of (myself definitely included).

Nicolas Slonimsky, a Russian-born American musicologist, composer and conductor, might have been the first to decipher what makes certain tunes irresistible, wrote Maria Konnikova in 2014 in The New Yorker; he released his insights in the 1947 book “Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns,” which had great influence on musicians like John Coltrane.

“Slonimsky didn’t have a specific term for the types of compulsively catchy melodies he created, but one came into being,” wrote Konnikova, crediting German psychiatrist Cornelius Eckert, who “described such tunes as ‘Ohrwürmer’—earworms. … While there still isn’t a strict definition of what constitutes an earworm, it is generally considered to be a constant loop of 15 to 20 seconds of music lodged in your head for at least a few hours, if not days—or, in severe cases, months.”

Story of my life, really. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” though, is probably the only earworm I don’t mind, though it does make people stare when I start singing it out loud or dancing to music only I hear, sometimes complete with “Wayne’s World” headbanging). One more reason to be a hermit.

David Silbersweig, the Stanley Cobb Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told the Harvard Gazette in 2021, “There are certain musical characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms, such as if the piece is repetitive, if there is a longer duration of certain notes, if intervals between the notes are smaller. Also, songs that trigger some kind of emotional charge, either consciously or not, or songs associated with a particular memory, can often be the ones that get stuck in your head.

“Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging have looked at the structure of the brain, and the results make sense in terms of the processes described above. There’s involvement of the auditory cortex in the temporal lobe of the brain that supports musical perception, and connections between that cortex and deep temporal-lobe areas, like the hippocampus or parahippocampal gyrus, that are important in memory encoding and retrieval. The phonological loop has been implicated—the process of holding something in your mind, like a mental scratchpad, for a certain number of seconds. So there are networks in the brain that support these functions of music—and memory, and attention, and keeping something in your head, and working memory. And then there’s the connection to the emotional regions of the brain, like the amygdala, which is involved in salience and negative emotion, and the ventral striatum, or nucleus accumbens, which is involved with positive emotion and reward. These are all elements that are thought to be involved in earworms.

“What happens is that connections in our brains involving these regions get ‘stuck,’ resulting in an automatic playing out of musical memories.” Some research suggests, Silbersweig said, that “people who have difficulty with working memory, like those suffering from attention-deficit disorder, may experience earworms less, while people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, where there are these loops that play over involuntarily in their heads, may be more prone to earworms.”

People with musical backgrounds also have the tendency toward earworms (grew up singing, and sang/trained in college), so apparently that outweighs my stroke-induced memory issues (mostly short-term memory) and possible ADD. Woo hoo.

Silbersweig suggests distraction as one way to get rid of an earworm. Uh, yeah, distraction is the problem. Heck, I don’t even have to hear a snippet of a song. I can be set off by a random spoken or written word or phrase. That’s how distractible I am!

Most of the time I let the earworm run its course because there’s little harm unless it’s accompanied by loss of consciousness or confusion, tremors, seizures, etc., which could indicate serious medical conditions.

And besides, research from UC-Davis released in 2021 suggests that earworms, while annoying, can help you process memory.

I’m satisfied that the vast majority of my earworms (and those of others) are benign. However, when it comes to certain artists (ahem, Taylor Swift among them; sorry, Swifties!), I may be led to beg for anything by any other artist to drive the earworm out before it drives me out of my mind.

I’m on a short thread some days, especially when it’s hot. It didn’t help that when I emailed my column to my boss Monday afternoon, he emailed back, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”

Dang it.