"Earworms", some people call them. Songs
that get stuck in your head go round and round, sometimes for days, sometimes
for months. For no clear reason you cannot help yourself from humming or
singing a tune by Lady Gaga.
To a psychologist, the most interesting thing about
earworms is that they show a part of our mind that is clearly outside of our
control. Earworms arrive without permission and refuse to leave when we tell
them to. They are parasites (寄生蟲) living in a part of our
minds.
If you have got an earworm you can suffer an attack of
it simply by someone mentioning the tune, without having to hear it. This
proves that earworms are a part of long-term memory. Humans have an "inner
ear", for remembering phone numbers, for instance. When it gets infected
with earworms, rather than review our plans for the day, or lists of things to
remember, the inner ear gets stuck on a few short bars of music or a couple of
phrases from a song. A part of us that we normally do not have to think about,
that should just do what we ask, has been turned against us, upsetting us with
a request that we never asked for. The mind is an inner world which we do not
have complete knowledge of, or have control over.
Fortunately psychology can provide some advice on how
to deal with an uncontrollable mind. Consider the famous "don’t think of a
white bear" problem, which tells you to try not to think about white
bears, or to do something else, to avoid both thinking of the white bear and
not thinking of the white bear. For earworms, the solution may be the same. Our
inner ear has become infected with an earworm. This is a part not under our
control, so just sending in instructions to "shut up" is unlikely to
be of much help (and has been shown to make it worse). Much better is to employ
the inner ear in another task. If your mind is poisoned by Brittany Spears’
Toxic, for instance, then try singing Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You out Of My
Head. Let me know if it works!
1.According to the passage, earworms are ______.
A.songs that
keep going round in our mind
B.worms that
live in a part of our brain
C.tunes by pop
singers like Lady Gaga
D.parasites
clearly under our control
2.Which of the following statements is TRUE?
A.Singing songs
may get earworms out of your head.
B.Earworms are
used for keeping long-term memory.
C.Humans do not
have complete control over their mind.
D.You won’t suffer from earworms unless you hear the song.
3.What does “it” in the last paragraph refer
to?
A.The
instruction to shut up your mind.
B.“Don’t think of the white bear” problem.
C.Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You out Of My Head.
D.Using the
earworm-infected inner ear in another task.
4.What is the passage mainly about?
A.The causes
and influences of earworms.
B.What earworms
are and how to deal with them.
C.How to clear
earworms out of your head.
D.The relation
between earworms and popular songs.