Surprisingly , the earworm project found that the catchiness of a tune is not especially important in determining whether we remember it or not , with only a handful of songs being listed by more than one user .
The root cause of earworm could be the fact that our brains encode music in a variety of different ways because it stimulates so many different senses , dr williamson said .
She asked the public to enter their stories of earworm on her website , earwormery.com , in collaboration with bbc6 music to get to the heart of what causes songs to pop up in our memory .