By Lindsay Fisher

So, here’s the situation: You’re a grown man, watching the game at the local watering hole. All is well and good until Taylor Swift sneaks her catchy song onto the bar’s airwaves. Now, hours later you’re at the grocery waiting in line and quietly singing “Shake It Off.” The next morning you wake up, STILL shaking it off. But, why?

You can blame it on earworms. We assure you that sounds far grosser than what it is. Earworms are little fragments – usually a song’s chorus – that gets stuck, like a broken record, in your brain.

Scientists aren’t exactly sure why hearing one Taylor song turns you into a Swiftie for hours at a time. However, music cognition research reveals earworms could be working with your brain’s motor cortex to torture you. Here’s how: When people listen to music there’s a lot of activity in the motor-planning regions of the brain. So, even if you don’t pay a lot of attention to the song, you’re still participating – involuntarily.

While 91 percent of the studied population say they’ve experienced an earworm. Scientists say it’s tough to totally nail down the reason why it happens since the whole song-in-your-head thing is involuntary.