UNRAVELING THE BRAIN DYNAMICS OF EARWORM EPISODES

Earworms, songs that get stuck in our head, are spontaneous musical memories, typically involving short fragments of tunes that repeat in a loop and pop into the mind within the stream of everyday self-generated thoughts. Despite being a widespread human phenomenon, their neural underpinnings still remain elusive due to their unguided and involuntary nature. We developed a novel fMRI paradigm to capture earworm episodes in real time (n = 100). Whole-brain analyses showed increased activation in the right auditory dorsal stream (ADS) during earworms compared to music listening and non‐musical spontaneous thoughts (e.g., episodic recall). Functional connectivity analyses revealed reciprocal coupling between the ADS and the precuneus, a key default mode network (DMN) node, during earworm episodes, while a similar reciprocal pattern emerged between the hippocampus and the precuneus during episodic recall. These findings suggest that earworms hijack cortical circuits involved in auditory working memory and voluntary musical imagery in concert with the DMN. Moreover, it highlights the DMN’s role as a dynamic hub in self‐generated thought, flexibly interacting with modality‐specific systems for different internal experiences.