The world may never be short of one precious resource: earworms. Songs or little catchy tunes that stay with you even if you only heard them once.

In an essay written for The Conversation, Emery Schubert, a professor at the Empirical Musicology Laboratory at the UNSW Sydney School of the Arts and Media, calls them by their more scientific name: “involuntary musical imagery.”

Earworms affect over 90 percent of people and happen thanks to your brain’s frustratingly efficient music organization system. Professor Schubert says our brains break music into fragments, organizing them into “pockets” of memory that get stitched together with use.

Some of those fragments (usually the catchiest parts of songs) repeat themselves immediately and seemingly unendingly. This infectious repetition is wh

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