文章探讨了物理老师如何利用“洗脑神曲”（即耳虫）帮助学生记忆和理解物理概念。作者通过在课堂上播放与物理知识相关的歌曲，例如David Bowie的“Changes”帮助学生记住作图时需要处理数据，Roxy Music的“Let’s stick together”提醒学生注意动量守恒，Vanilla Ice的“Ice ice baby”帮助记忆冰的熔化过程。文章强调了这种教学方法的有效性，认为音乐能激发学生的兴趣，增强记忆，并在课堂上创造轻松愉快的氛围。作者还分享了一个小测验，测试读者对物理知识和歌曲的联想能力。

🎵 引入“耳虫”概念：文章首先介绍了“耳虫”的概念，即那些容易在脑海中反复播放的、令人印象深刻的歌曲片段，并解释了其产生的内在原因，例如歌曲的重复性和简单的旋律。

💡 课堂实践应用：作者分享了他在物理课堂上使用“耳虫”的经验。通过将特定的歌曲与物理概念联系起来，例如，将David Bowie的“Changes”与图表绘制联系起来，帮助学生记忆和理解相关知识点。

😂 教学优势：作者强调了这种方法的优势，包括提高学生的学习兴趣、增强记忆效果，并在课堂上创造轻松愉快的氛围。学生们不仅可以记住物理知识，还能在课堂上一起唱歌，享受学习的乐趣。

🏆 最后的测验：文章最后提供了一个小测验，邀请读者将物理定律或实验与歌曲匹配，以此来检验读者对文章内容的理解，并增加了文章的趣味性。

When I’m sitting in my armchair, eating chocolate and finding it hard to motivate myself to exercise, a little voice in my head starts singing “You’ve got to move it, move it” to the tune of will.i.am’s “I like to move it”. The positive reinforcement and joy of this song as it plays on a loop in my mind propels me out of my seat and onto the tennis court.

Songs like this are earworms – catchy pieces of music that play on repeat in your head long after you’ve heard them. Some tunes are more likely to become earworms than others, and there are a few reasons for this.

To truly hook you in, the music must be repetitive so that the brain can easily finish it. Generally, it is also simple, and has a rising and falling pitch shape. While you need to hear a song several times for it to stick, once it’s wormed its way into your head, some lyrics become impossible to escape – “I just can’t get you out of my head”, as Kylie would say.

In his book Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks describes these internal music loops as “the brainworms that arrive unbidden and leave only on their own time”. They can fade away, but they tend to lie in wait, dormant until an association sets them off again – like when I need to exercise. But for me as a physics teacher for 16–18 year olds, this fact is more than just of passing interest: I use it in the classroom.

There are some common mistakes students make in physics, so I play songs in class that are linked (sometimes tenuously) to the syllabus to remind them to check their work. Before I continue, I should add that I’m not advocating rote learning without understanding – the explanation of the concept must always come first. But I have found the right earworm can be a great memory aid.

I’ve been a physics teacher for a while, and I’ll admit to a slight bias towards the music of the 1980s and 1990s. I play David Bowie’s “Changes” (which the students associate with the movie Shrek) when I ask the class to draw a graph, to remind them to check if they need to process – or change – the data before plotting. The catchy “Ch…ch…ch…changes” is now the irritating tune they hear when I look over their shoulders to check if they have found, for example, the sine values for Snell’s law, or the square root of tension if looking at the frequency of a stretched wire.

When describing how to verify the law of conservation of momentum, students frequently leave out the mechanism that makes the two trollies stick together after the collision. Naturally, this is an opportunity for me to play Roxy Music’s “Let’s stick together”.

Meanwhile, “Ice ice baby” by Vanilla Ice is obviously the perfect earworm for calculating the specific latent heat of fusion of ice, which is when students often drop parts of the equations because they forget that the ice both melts and changes temperature.

In the experiment where you charge a gold leaf electroscope by induction, pupils often fail to do the four steps in the correct order. I therefore play Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” to remind pupils to earth the disc with their finger. Meanwhile, Spandau Ballet’s bold and dramatic “Gold” is reserved for Rutherford’s gold leaf experiment.

“Pump up the volume” by M|A|R|R|S or Ireland’s 1990 football song “Put ‘em under pressure” are obvious candidates for investigating Boyle’s law. I use “Jump around” by House of Pain when causing a current-carrying conductor in a magnetic field to experience a force.

Some people may think that linking musical lyrics and physics in this way is a waste of time. However, it also introduces some light-hearted humour into the classroom – and I find teenagers learn better with laughter. The students enjoy mocking my taste in music and coming up with suitable (more modern) songs, and we laugh together about the tenuous links I’ve made between lyrics and physics.

More importantly, this is how my memory works. I link phrases or lyrics to the important things I need to remember. Auditory information functions as a strong mnemonic. I am not saying that this works for everyone, but I have heard my students sing the lyrics to each other while studying in pairs or groups. I smile to myself as I circulate the room when I hear them saying phrases like, “No you forgot mass × specific latent heat – remember it’s ‘Ice, ice baby!’ ”.

On their last day of school – after two years of playing these tunes in class – I hold a quiz where I play a song and the students have to link it to the physics. It turns into a bit of a sing-along, with chocolate for prizes, and there are usually a few surprises in there too. Have a go yourself with the quiz below.

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