Elizabeth Margulis

Yeah, this is, I would say, the most surprising finding in my entire career.

And the way this came about is we had put people inside individual sound-attenuated booths, played them excerpts of music that they told us they'd never heard before, asked them to just type out what it was they imagined while they were listening.

So now, you know, this experiment's going on for several weeks.

We're finished with data collection.

I open up the files, start looking at what it is that I'm going to find.

And we just found that for the same excerpt, person after person was telling us just an uncannily similar story.

story down to very specific details, like it was a street in the 1920s, right?

It's sunrise over a meadow and tiny creatures awaken and start to frolic.

Even this word frolic was showing up again and again from person to person.

So what's clear is that even though we think we're doing something really idiosyncratic and personal, there's this tight connection between what's happening in the sound and what's happening in our internal thoughtscape.

So for our very first set of studies, we used examples of instrumental art music, right?

So this is like orchestral string quartet kind of stuff.

And it was building on that in our subsequent studies that we branched out.

We used things like Chinese instrumental music.

We used electronic dance music constantly.

country music, pop music, hip hop.

So we kind of started in one domain and then tried to spread out.

Just imagine, right, you hear, it's like a saxophone solo, right?

Like a plaintive saxophone solo.

Someone might be like, oh, I'm in a dark bar.