Why You Can't Get That Song From 'Frozen' Out Of Your Head

"Let it go, let it go."

It's the song that seems to be stuck in everyone's head. And Idina Menzel's (a.k.a. Adele Dazeem's) rousing Oscars performance of the hit "Frozen" tune on Sunday only fueled the internal repeat loop. But why exactly do songs get stuck in our head in the first place?

Science has labeled the stuck-song phenomenon an "earworm," which is a direct translation from the German word "ohrwurm." One University of Cincinnati study found that 98 percent of people occasionally experience a song lodged in their heads (popular earworms in that study, which was conducted more than 10 years ago, included Kit-Kat's "Gimme A Break" jingle, "Who Let The Dogs Out" and "YMCA"). In another 2010 study published in the British Journal of Psychology, researchers found that artists such as Pink Floyd and Justin Timberlake were repeat earworm offenders.

"The sorts of songs which become earworms are highly individual but they have to be very familiar and it helps if they are being played constantly across the various media," the lead author of that study, Dr. Philip Beaman, associate professor of cognitive sciences at the University of Reading, tells HuffPost in an email. "Christmas songs are reported to be more frequent earworms in December than in August, for example, which may go some way to explaining the prevalence of the Frozen song as an earworm."

And that repetition may be especially common for kids' songs. "One thing about earworms is them being repeated a lot, so I get many, many frayed parents who have listened to too many children introduction songs or learning songs, and they heard them 30, 40, 50, 100 times and they're stuck as a result," psychologist Vicky Williamson told NPR in 2012. She says simple songs seem to make up the majority of earworms, though they can also be very complicated.

The typical song snippet lasts no longer than 30 seconds, Beaman says, and if it's just one part of the song playing over and over in the head, his research shows it's typically the chorus or the refrain (though the actual part of the song that plays in your head is also likely to vary).