Instant Genius - What we can learn from music’s ability to evoke images in our minds

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

For most of us, music has a unique, almost supernatural, ability to trigger our emotions and memories and conjure up evocative images or even fantasies in our minds in a way that few other experiences or art forms can. But what exactly is happening in our brains when we listen to music, is there such a thing as a common musical experience that’s shared by people from different cultures and backgrounds, and can we use any of these powerful effects to help bolster our health and wellbeing? In this episode, we’re joined by Prof Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University, to talk about her latest book, Transported – The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams. She tells us how, while we may think of listening to music as a highly subjective experience, there are many universal ways people from all walks of life are affected by it, how researchers are studying this fascinating phenomenon, and how we may be able to harness these deeply human effects to help boost our mental health, wellbeing and even creativity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. For most of us, music has a unique, almost supernatural ability to trigger our emotions and memories and conjure up evocative images or even fantasies in our minds in a way that few other experiences or art forms can. But what exactly is happening in our brains when we listen to music? Is there such a thing as a common musical experience that's shared across people

from different cultures and backgrounds? And can we use any of these powerful effects to help bolster our health and well-being? In this episode, we're joined by Professor Elizabeth Margulis, director at the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University, to talk about her latest book, transported, the everyday magic of musical daydreams. She tells us why we may think of listening to music as a highly subjective experience, there are many universal ways people from all walks of life are affected by it, how researchers are studying this fascinating phenomenon, and how we may be able to harness these deeply human effects

to help boost our mental health, well-being, and even improve our creativity. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So today we're talking about your latest book, Transported, the Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams. So that's an intriguing title. So let's start with the obvious question.

What do you mean by the term musical daydream? Well, I start out with an answer to that in the book with a scene from the movie. It's the final scene from the movie Lala Land where the character played by Emma Stone has had a whirlwind romance with the character played by Ryan Gosling. It ultimately hasn't worked out. It's now several years later. She's happily married and chances into a basement bar that turns out to be the one owned by her former boyfriend. He approaches the stage, comes out. starts playing a tune at the piano. It's the song he'd been playing when they first met.

And we as an audience go along with her on this musical daydream. Everything around her fades to black and were transported back to their initial encounter. We relive it with her. And then it morphs into a series of fantasies about what their life could have been like if things had worked out. At some point, the music ends. He takes his hands off the keyboard, and that's when the daydream crumbles as well. We find ourselves back in this basement bar. So this is exactly what I mean by a musical daydream. You're listening to music, but you find yourself somewhere else entirely. So having said that, do we all experience them? Because a while back, I found out that some people, when they're reading book, well, they can't visualize images based on

words. So if you say kettle, they just think, oh, kettle, whereas most people would have an image of a kettle in their mind. Is there a similar thing with the musical daydreams? Does everyone get them or do we not know yet? This is a wonderful question and there started to be some work on music and affintasia, which is this situation where you can't picture things vividly in your mind's eye, actually conducted by Sarah Hashim in the UK. So we're starting to get some tantalizing clues. And it does seem like many of these musical daydreams have a particularly visual. attribute that means they can be interfered with if you don't have the capacity to generate that kind of imagery. However, we know that there are other modalities of imagery that can be

important in music listening as well. I'll give you one example. I have a PhD student, Karen Christensen, who is doing work on music evoked kinesthetic imagery or mechie. And this is the feeling that when you're listening to music, even when you're not moving, even when you're just sitting still, you have an imagined sense of your body moving. And so that's just an example of the way that that kind of engagement can happen beyond the visual. Yeah, so let's sort of stick with this idea of different people doing it in different ways. So you talk about the kind of content of a musical daydream that's triggered by a certain piece of music. And sort of compare different people from different populations, even different countries and things like that.

And then we can compare if there's any similarities. So what do we know about that? Well, we have found that when we bring people in one at a time to a sound attenuated booth, we give them a really unconstrained task, right? We just say, tell us what you were imagining when you're listening to this excerpt. We've carefully chosen music that they're unlikely to have heard before. And what we see is that people, so when we looked at people from different parts of the US, being tested in this way, they produced strikingly similar responses down to the particular words being used for individual excerpts. So this was really surprising to us, and we got curious about, you know, how far this tendency spread. We also collected data in a rural village in China

where people speak dong, and the motivation for going there was to really find a place where the exposure to Western media would be very limited. And there we ran the same study and found something similar in the sense that people in this village were all individually producing these vivid descriptions that were very similar to one another in terms of how they responded to particular excerpts. But then if you looked between their responses and the responses of our U.S. participants, the differences were striking. I'll give you my favorite example. There is an excerpt that U.S. participants heard as someone alone in a house getting stalked by a murderer, and participants in

demon heard the same music as people having fun outside, playing games with friends. Quite a stark difference there. Indeed. So how about like sticking with the kind of different effects for different people? So as you write, you're a pianist. So is there a difference between the musical daydreams or like the, I don't know the strength or how vivid they are between musicians and non-musicians? Also such an excellent question that we've been really interested in. And we have it in our own work directly studied, highly trained musicians, so I can't give you a super conclusive answer, but I can give you some hints that have come up in our work. First of all, just from my own personal experience, as a trained classical pianist, I had to really be converted myself to the idea of these musical daydreams because I'd really been trained to engage with music in these different kind of more focused ways. And indeed, that's what we see when we, like, so we, for example, we collected data at a subscription concert series here on,

Princeton University's campus featuring the Takash string quartet and pianist Stephen Huff. The audience for this concert series tends to be highly trained and quite well versed in classical traditions. And that audience, several people kind of wrote in on their responses. This was so hard for me because I feel like I've spent my entire life trying to not daydream while I listen in a concert. So there really is this sense that maybe letting your mind wander is some kind of failure, you know, to listen attentively. And one of the things I argue for in the book is that actually these drifting experiences can reveal deep musical insights that we didn't even know we had. Can that effect occur sort of subconsciously?

So say if we're in a shop or a restaurant, do we still see the same effect? So this is one of the most intriguing things, is that we often have the sense that we're something really idiosyncratic and personal, we might not even know that what we're imagining has anything to do with the music or, as you mentioned in the grocery store example, that there's music playing at all. Yet when we go in and study these experiences and study the contents of what's coming to mind, we find that they're often tightly choreographed by the music. Another thing that I find really fascinating is earworms, you know, why certain tunes gets stuck in your head if you're in a shop or something, you'll walk away, not aware that you've been

listening to a certain piece, and then you'll start humming it. Exactly. So there's that similar obliqueness. I mean, you can also just kind of walk by something that has something to do with the lyric of a song and find a song stuck in your head and not be able to trace back kind of where it came from. Right. So there is this just pervasive way that these associations music has can condition certain experiences. Yeah, and that's sort of sticking with that. One particularly irritating experience that I have is quite often I won't even like the song that's stuck in my head. That's a bummer. And one thing I've heard people suggest is that when you have something stuck in your head that's annoying, the most reliable way to get it unstuck

is to purposely try to induce an earworm for a song you do like, which seems like really letting the earworms win, but, you know. So let's have a look at another fascinating thing that you talked about, and that's the link between music and memory, I mean in triggering memories. So what can we say about that? One thing researchers have been really interested in with music evoked autobiographical memories is their potential to be used in clinical settings, such as for people experiencing dementia. And the reason they have been so tantalizing to study is that there's a known reminiscence bump for music from your teenage years, where you tend to like those songs

more even later in live and have more vivid personal memories associated with them. You also have a secondary reminiscence bump for music from your parents' teenage years. And what we think is happening there is before you're old enough to have any age in what you're listening to. You know, you're strapped into a high chair or whatever. Your parents are playing their favorite songs, which tend to come from their teenage years. You get these kind of cascading generations of musical preferences.

Great news. The federal EV rebate is back. Eligible customers get up to $5,000 with the federal EVAP rebate on select 2027 Volt and 26 Equinox EVM models. Visit your local. Chevrolet dealer today for more details. Here we go. Someone's already claiming this is our year.

Someone else said that last year too. A round of Jameson, Ginger, and Lime arrives at a table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments. Added Jameson to your match day lineup.

Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. You also talk about the effect between music and creativity. So I think if, you know, at first glance, you think, well, it seems to make sense that a composer, for example, could be inspired by the moods and feelings of a certain piece of music. But how about, you know, other art forms such as painters or novelists? Right. So, you know, here's an interesting tidbit from our own research. that I can offer here.

We were able to use this same paradigm that I've been describing, where people come in and they listen to an excerpt of music and they tell us what they imagine. But this time, we also used a trait-level measure of creativity. So just a conventional measure that's used in psychology to provide some kind of account of how creative a person tends to be. And what we found is, you know, might actually think for a second about what you suspect we might find, right? What would the

musical imaginings be like of someone who scores as more creative on one of these standard tests? And we found, you know, you might expect that they'd be kind of more original or something, right? And in fact, we found the exact opposite. So the more creative people were, the closer to the center of musical imaginings for that particular excerpt were the ones that they spontaneously produced. And what we think is potentially happening here is that one of the attributes that, you know, helps you produce creative outputs is a certain responsiveness, a kind of flexibility. So if there's some kind of cue, like a music or an image or what have you, you can really quickly kind of follow the associations that stream from that without being rigidly stuck to the

thoughtscape you had going into the experience. So I suppose that that kind of responsiveness might be relevant to creativity in many different domains. How about different genres of music? Do we see sort of like some are more likely to trigger more closer to the center distributions, whereas something, you know, a bit more obscure like avant-garde music or jazz or something. Maybe there'll be a bit more all over the place. Right. Now here's something that's a little was also surprising to me is in fact the less familiarity people have with a genre

the more kind of conventionalized and narrower kind of these responses get. So it's almost the inverse. Like people who have a lot of experience with the kind of music you're describing might have this whole array of possible, you know, associations to it. But for people who it doesn't form

a part of their daily listening habits, In fact, the responses tend to get quite repetitive and conventional across participants. Do we know anything about, you know, people who have things like synesthesia? I think that's a really fascinating thing, you know, that sort of say like, oh, you know, that particular note sounds yellow or blue or something. Do they show any differences? What a wonderful question. There's someone at University of Durham called Caroline Curwen, who is doing research.

which exactly on these music evoked imaginings in people with synesthesia. And, you know, one of the reasons that's such an interesting question is because people with synesthesia tend to have very particular and kind of unique to themselves associations. Like for one person F sharp is blue and for another person it's purple, right? Whereas what we're seeing in these music evoked imaginings is this commonality, this shared kind of imagining across people. So you might start by thinking synesthetes might be doing something more eccentric that's stuck with, you know, in their kind of particular sets of associations. And that research is ongoing, but that's something I know she's trying to disentangle. Yeah, how about

another thing, the kind of link between music and bonding or friendships. So I think, you know, quite a lot of people will have had the experience, I don't know, it's the first day at a new school or something, and somebody's wearing a t-shirt of a band that you really like. So obviously, you're going to want to speak to them. Do we have any, any sort of, can we expand that idea at all? Absolutely. I mean, this is one of those reasons that music evoked memories and imaginings can be so powerful is they really tie together certain social groups and really a sense of identity. That's one of the reasons we see people listing favorite music at the very top. of their dating profiles online.

And one of the interesting findings here that has happened in recent years is led by Kara Turnbull at Princeton, is that even these music evoked autobiographical memories. So even when I hear a song and it makes me remember something from my own teenage years, the contents of the memory that I describe tend to be shared with other people. from my generation. So there are these kind of sociocultural scripts where certain songs can bring us back to really what feels like a shared experience.

And I think that's one aspect to this connective tissue that music can create that we haven't really paid too much attention to previously. Yeah, another one is the kind of, over the last, I don't know, several decades probably, is the link between music and mental health. So I don't know if it's the same case in the US, but over, yeah, I don't know, 10, 15, probably even, I'm getting a bit old now, probably even 20 years.

There's been a huge rise in the number of people joining things like community choirs. There's been studies on that, and apparently that does all sorts of good for your, you know, for your mood and your mental health. Absolutely. There's lots of really great research about active music making and especially ensemble music making, doing it together in a group, one of the things that we're finding is that even lower, what we might think about is lower levels of musical participation, like listening, right, when you're not necessarily even taking part and producing the music can also be powerful.

So imagine that you're, you know, have depression or anxiety, and one of the kind of symptoms there can pertain to spontaneous thought. So you can have really kind of stuck thoughts, a kind of ruminating cycling. And one of the things that's powerful about this research and musical daydreams is, you know, we now know that you could do something as simple as pressing play and really jumpstart a completely different internal kind of set of thoughts and imaginings. And then that can kind of like feedback into a loop that takes you out of kind of the rut that you were in. So that's a path forward. in terms of music and mental health that I find really intriguing.

And I think people, by the way, intuit that and kind of are using music kind of off-label in that way as a mood-regulating device already. Yeah, so another exciting and interesting area is, as we mentioned right at the top, the ability of music to trigger memories. So it turns out that this can also help people suffering from various cognitive issues, such as dementia. There are really powerful videos online and lots of anecdotal evidence of people

who are really not responsive and not recognizing their loved ones around them, listening to beloved songs from their adolescence and just kind of being reawakened in terms of their orientation to who they have been and what their relationships are with the people. people around them. And so that's something that science is now paying a lot of attention to

and trying to understand. So we've covered an awful lot there, but by sort of way of summing up, let's have a look into the future then. So obviously this is a big open-ended question. But what are some of the kind of outstanding key questions that researchers like yourself in this field would like to answer? We want to understand the contours of what is most readily imaginable. So, you know, if you think about how we function in the world, you know, what we're capable of experiencing and contributing in our lives, music is kind of a probe that tells you where your brain tends to go, right? So you get, you get this excerpt, you start imagining this thing. And as we're doing this research,

we're finding that the edges of that are interesting. Like there aren't an infinite number of things that we're finding that get triggered, right? There's like a subset. And that space that you tend to move through in terms of what you imagine is pretty influential to, you know, where your thoughts go when you're, you know, not controlling them, right? Where they just kind of spontaneously wander. And that has lots of downstream impact. So we're kind of interested in just understanding.

that space and then what we can do to maybe broaden it or, you know, nudge it in these directions that are most conducive to health and well-being. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Elizabeth Margulis. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her book. Transported, the everyday magic of musical daydreams. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel? At Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can, Also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com.