When music transports you to a different place
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What are musical daydreams and why do they matter?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Do you ever hear a song that seems to immediately transport you to a specific time and place? I am a little embarrassed by this, but this song does always get me.
But you've got your volume. Okay, I'm 13 in Saints Roller Ring.
The disco lights are going. I'm holding another seventh grader's sweaty hand and it is all very, very awkward. I'm sure you have your own version. And this auditory wormhole has a name, a musical daydream. And my next guest is kind of obsessed with figuring them out, why they happen, how they happen, and what they tell us about ourselves. Dr. Elizabeth Margulis is the director of Princeton's Music Cognition Lab. She's also the author of the book, Transported, The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams.
How does music trigger vivid memories and sensations?
Elizabeth, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Do you have a relationship with Dave Matthews Band?
You know what? I have a sibling who has a deep relationship with Dave Matthews Band, so I have a kind of vicarious relationship.
Well, you're lucky. Okay, so this may be a dumb question, but is there a scientific definition of a daydream?
Well, when it comes to daydreaming in general, that includes experiences like mind wandering. And when we're thinking about musical daydreams, they can feel idiosyncratic and subjective in that same way. But we're learning that typically the music is driving the contents of what you're imagining in really interesting ways. Well, tell me about that. How is the music driving the contents of my daydream? So in the example that you played, I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that you literally were in a Saints roller rink while that song was playing. And that is one mechanism, right? That's the they're playing our song phenomenon where something really just imprints on the sound. and can come back decades later and carry with it.
Like a smell. Exactly. Bringing you back. Exactly. But, you know, the thing about musical cues in these cases, though, is they tend to trigger more of a reliving full of these kind of sensory details than just a simple recollection. But there are also cases where it's a song you've never heard before and it transports you to some prior phase of your life. And that can't be explainable in quite the same way. There are also cases where you hear music and you get lost in some kind of imagining of something that never really happened to you or is just entirely fantastical and couldn't really happen to you. And in those cases, the mechanism is a little different.
I mean, do some types of music elicit musical daydreams more easily than others?
Yes. So there's a known reminiscence bump for music from your teenage years where you tend to like that music more even later in life and have more vivid personal memories associated with it. But there's also a secondary reminiscence bump for music from your parents' teenage years where And what we think is going on there is that when you are a tiny person and don't have control over what's playing on the kitchen radio, your parents often have the music from their teenage years queued up.
What is the scientific definition of a daydream?
What about genres? I mean, do some genres hit people harder? Yeah, we've seen this kind of daydreaming happen across all the genres we've studied, and we've tried to study a lot of them. We do find that the more we're looking at kind of instrumental music that doesn't have lyrics, the more kind of pronounced we get these kinds of fantastical imaginings, especially.
So what is going on in people's brain when they're having a musical daydream?
We've been able to take a look because now that we've done all this behavioral research and we know for certain songs that people won't have heard before we put them in the scanner, but we've played them for other people outside the scanner and we know what they're likely to imagine that We can now bring them in to get an MRI scan and play them either this song or play them a recording of someone speaking the story we know that they're likely to imagine and then compare their brain activity across these two conditions.
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