The Science Of Why baby Shark Is So Freaking Catchy

Because of the reward system, music is probably the artistic product we reuse the most. After all, we rarely watch a movie or read a book much more than two or three times.

In that aspect, catchiness, depending on how digestible the music is to the listener, has a level of annoyance unlike anything else. In this article Stafford reviews the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks and the conclusion by Sacks that this catchiness is due to the inherent repetitiveness of popular music, which can affect our ability to remember a song.

It's also the reason you have the urge to sing or dance along with music you really like. And at least one study suggests that there may be genetic underpinnings related to our desire to consume sweet beverages. In the study, people who had a variant in a gene known as FTO — which has previously been linked to a lower risk of obesity — surprisingly had an affinity for sweetened beverages. But why do some people seem to crave soda after soda, while others can have just one and be satisfied? It may have to do with some of the ritual aspects of soda drinking, which also play a role in our brain’s chemistry. Ilari points out that a 2015 video version of the same song had only animated, anthropomorphic characters.

I have seen many, many deejays, been to many, many shows, but very few sets I’ve seen were able to reach that level of purity. The entire hour was put together with something close to perfection. Few minutes passed by and the next deejays started playing, it was the moment that 3 of us decided to take a small strategic bathroom break.

As a result, the verse becomes longer and less repetitive, which starkly contrasts with the chorus. A bridge is a section that creates contrast between the verse, pre-chorus, and chorus.

Sure, you can’t get enough of it but eventually, it gets so addicting you just can’t shake it off anymore. It’s as if the track decided to have a permanent home in your head and then randomly appear even when you’re not thinking about it. And when it starts playing, we feel compelled to sing along and maybe headbang while we’re at it – it’s like we’re committing a sin against Tommy and Gina if we don’t do so. It’s a good song and perhaps the secret lies in the reealt mkujtohet rhythm. Take all the lyrics away and if we’re left with only the rhythm, we’re still fine. The fact that this Europe classic hit topped the charts in 5 countries should say it all.

“Macarena” had millions of people throughout the world doing the dance steps that were shown by an illustration in the song’s original video. More than 20 years after its release, the first strains of “Macarena” are sure to fill the dance floors at weddings and other events with DJs. All the songs mentioned in this article have terrific videos. It is possible that without the viral video that shows the dance moves that accompany “Baby Shark,” that song might never have reached the prominence to which it rose. The video for “Old Town Road” was GRAMMY-nominated for Best Short Form Music Video. The video that accompanies Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down” was awarded MTV’s 2019 Music Video of the Year and helped the song reach the top-10 in more than 20 countries. The video for Camila Cabello’s mega-hit “Havana” received this award in 2018.

If you listen to something a bunch of times, it makes its way to the other end of the spectrum, and we stop learning anything new when we listen to it, which our biological systems are hypersensitive towards. And maybe that spectrum is a bit wider for you than it is for your friends and colleagues. Meaning it takes longer for you before your brain realises that you aren't actually learning anything new. Yes precisely, or if you're sat with a bowl of candy in front of you, and just can't stop stuffing your face even though you're full. You don't need it to survive, but it's able to worm its way into our survival systems. The positive thing about music is that it is in no way harmful to people's survival.

It predicts the reward that you’ll feel from a given piece of music based on similar types of music you’ve heard before. If you like it better than predicted, it registers as intense pleasure. If you feel worse than predicted, you feel bored or disappointed. The brain scans highlighted the nucleus accumbens, often referred to as the brain’s ‘pleasure center’, a deep region of the brain that connects to dopamine neurons and is activated during eating, gambling and sex. It turns out that connections between the nucleus accumbens and several other brain areas could predict how much a participant was willing to spend on a given song. Those areas included the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotion, the hippocampus, which is important for learning and memory, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making. Salimpoor began by giving 126 volunteers comprehensive surveys about their musical preferences.