“It’s a small world, after all. It’s a small world, after all. It’s a small world after all. It’s a small, small world.”

That first paragraph was a test, just to mess with your mind.

Did it work? Has the tune burrowed its way into your head?

Check back with us in an hour. Or five hours. Or two days.

Ha, ha.

You’ve been infected with an “earworm.”

James Kellaris knows the feeling. He coined the phrase to describe those catchy, love-to-hate-them tunes that get in your mind and just won’t go away.

“They represent a loss of mental control,” says Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Business. “We are most comfortable when we are in control of our thoughts.”

Or, in other words, we’re not comfortable when the Village People are controlling our thoughts. (“It’s fun to stay at the YMCA. It’s fun to stay at the YMCA.”)

Kellaris’ research, broadly speaking, is on the effects of music on consumers. But he gets the most attention for his work on why songs get stuck in people’s heads.

He’s even come up with a top-10 list of songs that most often get stuck in people’s minds, according to a survey. He calls it his “Playlist from Hell.”

Kellaris theorizes the earworm phenomenon a sort of “cognitive itch.”

He explains it this way: “Certain properties of music may be analogous to biochemical agents, such as histamines, which cause an itch on the skin. The only way to scratch a cognitive itch is to repeat the offending music mentally. But this only exacerbates the itch, trapping the hapless victim in an involuntary cycle of repeated itching and scratching.”

The trends

Some of Kellaris’ research findings:

¢ Certain people tend to be more prone to having songs stuck in their heads than others. Women and those prone to worrying are likely to be infected. So are musicians, since they’re around tunes more than the average person. (“We will, we will, rock you.”)

¢ Simple, repetitive songs are the most likely to affect you. (“Who let the dogs out? Who, who, who, who, who let the dogs out?”)

¢ Marketers may try to write songs that become earworms. But they also risk frustrating their clientele to the point of alienation. (“I want my baby back, baby back, baby back, Chili’s…babyback ribs…”)

In your head

Earworms aren’t something John Colombo, a psychology professor at Kansas University, has spent much time thinking about. After all, it’s not like he’s going to get a federal grant to study them.

But he has some theories of his own.

He calls the phenomenon “priming.” It’s basically the same reason most of us brush our teeth the same way every morning. Once you start a process, it’s easier to follow through with it the way you always do it. The extreme version of that is obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Colombo says the same thing happens with songs. Once one gets triggered in your head, it just keeps playing on a loop.

“It never happens with a new song, one we’ve just learned,” he says. “They’re simple things that are pretty well-practiced, things that are strongly ingrained in the system.”

He says the songs that haunt him are the tunes he would sing to help put his children to sleep. (“In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.”)

But he’d rather not mention those publicly, for fear that his enemies will use them against him.

“They’re nothing I would want mentioned in the newspaper,” he says, with a laugh.

So apparently, getting that information will, in fact, be “Mission: Impossible.”

The remedies

The No. 1 rule in getting rid of an earworm, Kellaris says, is not to worry too much about it.

“When a worrier gets bitten by an earworm, he or she thinks, ‘Oh, no. Here we go again!'” he says. “Then the worry prolongs the life of the earworm.”

Here’s what to try if you’re looking for a break from a song (“Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar”):

1. Distraction: Find something else to concentrate on mentally.

2. Replace the song with something else, preferably something better than the original tune.

3. Completion: Listen to the song, or sing it from beginning to end.

4. Play “tune tag”: Share the song with someone else. Maybe this will pass it off to them.

So if you’re looking for an answer to your earworm problem … “Whoomp, there it is! Whoomp, there it is!”

Hopefully, this story hasn’t implanted too many earworms. These song lyrics are all from Kellaris’ top-10 list of earworm songs, by the way.

If something did stick, though, don’t worry too much. Chances are, someone else is dealing with the same thing.

It’s a small world, after all.