Elizabeth Margulis

speaker

267 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard May 2026 last heard 21 Jun

Elizabeth Margulis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Something You Should Know · Why Humans Crave Rituals & How Music Transports Your Mind · 25 May 2026 podcast

Great to be here.

Whenever you're listening to music and the world around you fades a little bit, you might not even think you're hearing the sound as closely and you get lost in a memory, something that happened to you in the distant past or an imagining of something that's never happened to you.

So when your mind wanders from focusing on the sound itself into some kind of memory or imagining, that is a musical daydream.

absolutely so and this can happen in really unexpected ways right where you forgot a song existed maybe you haven't thought about this moment for years and then it comes on you know the stereo when you're at a cafe or what have you and suddenly you're back remembering something that happened to you in 11

great and great gory detail and that's something science has been really interested in in recent years finding that music is a particularly potent cue for this kind of transportive memory and why is that important what's the so what here and because i think people have had this experience but when the song's over so is the experience and life goes on and that's the end of that

Right.

It's interesting how little attention we tend to pay to these moments.

But what we're seeing is that there's a whole bunch of really fascinating structure to what happens here.

For example, if I play a song and you get lost in your own personal memory and I get lost in my own personal memory, when we analyze free response descriptions of these memories, we see that there are characteristics that tend to be broadly shared among people.

That is, when we play a specific song, many of us end up getting lost in some memory that's pretty similar from individual to individual.

So, a couple of consequences.

One, there's a real opportunity for connection and mutual understanding here, both about ourselves and about other people.

best estimates of how much time we spent in this kind of mind-wandering from 10 years back or so are somewhere between a third and half of our day.

And that is increasingly rare, that kind of mind-wandering state, because we so often lose

have a screen stuck in front of our face, right?

Even when we're sitting on the subway or doing dishes, often there's a whole stream of stimuli that we're encountering.

So music, I really view it as the last refuge of the daydream in many ways.

When we're walking around listening to songs through headphones, we can still get lost in these kinds of imaginative scenes that turn out to be really fundamental to how our brain works and how we make sense of our life and find meaning.

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.

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