Funny thing, earworms. Since watching Netflix's Wayward series the past few nights, I've been afflicted by two: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band and Pink Floyd's Time.

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I can't seem to dislodge them, I suspect because they carry warm memories from adolescence. The Band's song, with its anthemic chorus and story of being on the losing side in the American Civil War, was on high rotation when I was 10. By the time I was 13, few record collections did not include Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon album. And its ticking, chiming track Time - a warning full of urgency about not wasting time - was a standout.

It's not an unpleasant sensation with these two old favourites, but there have been times when an annoying earworm has lodged and I've struggled to drive it from my brain. The worst culprits are advertising jingles, and the worst of those seem to come from the regions.

If you've lived in NSW anywhere near Wollongong in the past 25 years, you might want to skip the next paragraph:

"All you want, personal computin'/They're the best, there's no disputin ... Computer Town Australia/a-Windang Road, a-Windang."

You were warned.

With its animated boot-scootin' computers, the ad drove me nuts back in the 2000s when it made watching commercial TV an ordeal. And when the jingle lodged as an earworm long after it stopped airing, I toyed with getting professional help to expunge it.

The science of earworms is intriguing. Known also as phonological loops, they are 20-second musical segments that get stuck on repeat as your brain tries to recover the memory of the whole song or musical passage. Repetitive pieces, longer notes, shorter intervals between them - all the things that make music catchy - are more likely to lodge. The emotions they........

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