Seeing a patient in my (A.J.L.) neurology practice with temporal lobe epilepsy who described 鈥渕usic in his head鈥� led us to review the neurophysiologic and clinical features of musical intrusions, commonly referred to as earworms.
We started with the text and citations of 3 narrative reviews1-3 and, using earworms as a search keyword along with its synonyms (involuntary musical imagery, musical intrusions, brain worms, sticky music, musical obsessions, stuck song syndrome, musical imagery repetition), searched the English-language literature from inception through 2023 on PubMed, PsycINFO, Google Scholar, and Scopus for additional recent studies not included in the reference lists of the reviews. We identified 15 additional relevant resources, 14 of which described original research, details of which are summarized in the Supplement. Virtually all articles were found in the psychology, humanities, and neuroscience literature and based on self-report of small case series of healthy people.