Elizabeth Margulis

I'm sitting at the corner, right?

So there's these kind of sociocultural scripts

where you're likely to encounter certain kinds of sounds.

So that's in the case where you get something that feels a little bit like a personal memory.

But it can also feel like an imagined scenario, like a fantastical scenario.

Another example of that could be you've got an electronic excerpt

super flowy, right?

Has this kind of shimmering timbre.

In those kinds of cases, we get a lot of descriptions of people talking about feeling like they're floating on the ocean, right?

The sun glimmering on the tops of the waves.

So there's this kind of immersive experience.

So it's not just

that you have a certain concept that comes to mind.

It's more than that.

It's that you have this kind of imagined reliving or quasi-experiential dimension to this imagining.

And again, that tends to be robustly shared among individuals for particular excerpts.

So maybe the best example of an autobiographical memory, which is what you're describing to music, which I conceptualize under this general umbrella of a musical daydream, comes at the end of La La Land.

Have you seen that movie?

At the end, so remember the character played by Emma Stone and the character played by Ryan Gosling, right?

They don't make it.