Ray D'Arcy

Thanks for asking.

It was this.

So every time I tried to get to sleep, your man was back there.

His name is Dominic something.

It's one of Tom's favourite songs.

And it was in my head last night going around and around and around and around.

And it was sort of, it wasn't a normal earworm because I do get earworms.

But usually they occupy my head during the day and usually they're enjoyable things.

We'll go through it now in a minute.

But I got up this morning and I had to investigate the whole earworm thing.

It's a perennial when it comes to magazines and radio programmes.

The term earworm was coined by somebody in Germany.

Erworm, erworm, erworm.

And they've done a little bit of research on it, the scientists.

It happens in the auditory cortex.

So the scientists found that the auditory cortex, which is somewhere in the middle of the brain, that's active when you're actually listening to a song, was reactivated when you just imagine hearing the song.

So your auditory cortex acts like an mp3 player.

And sometimes, they don't know exactly why it happens, but sometimes it gets stuck on repeat on a song.

And it isn't even a full song.

It's just a bit of a song.