Science Friday - When music transports you to a different place

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Do you ever hear a song that transports you to a specific place and time? This auditory wormhole has a name: musical daydreams. Music cognition expert Elizabeth Margulis studies why they happen, and what they tell us about our brains. She joins Host Flora Lichtman to discuss this phenomenon. Guest: Dr. Elizabeth Margulis is a professor and director of Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab. She’s also the author of “Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams.” Other episodes you may enjoy: A Neurologist Investigates His Own Musical Hallucinations Oliver Sacks Searched The Brain For The Origins Of Music Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 in place? I am a little embarrassed by this, but this song does always get me. You've got your ball, you got your chain tied to me, tight time when you're fucking, who's got the claws in you. my friend into your heart. 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. 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.

You're 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, 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. 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 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, 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. And what do you see? Using that, we see the emergence of these higher order areas like the default mode network that carry this kind of meaning of this imagined story across these sensory modalities. So you're not just seeing like the auditory cortex lighting up. You're seeing other parts of the brain that deal with narrative. Exactly. So, yes, we see all the things you'd expect when you listen to music in terms of auditory

processing and all of that. But we're also able to see using this paradigm that we're getting this higher order area active as well. I want to talk about a big part of your research, which is shared musical daydreams, which is so fascinating. For songs, people haven't heard before. So I want to play a clip. And listeners, pay attention to what your brain starts to think about.

Okay, so for me, I get, you know, saloon vibes, wooden bar, one of those doors with the slats swinging open. How do other people, where do other people's minds go when they hear this? Pretty much the same neighborhood. What we often get from people is a lonely cowboy, We get specifically those two words often. Sitting on a porch looking over a ghost town, sometimes there's a tumbleweed involved. And what's so interesting here is that's actually an example of Chinese art music. So not a cowboy, not a Western tune is what I'm hearing.

No, what's really interesting is that, you know, it can be music. This is music maybe even in a style that, you know, the participants in our studies may have not even been familiar with. Yet, nevertheless, they have this immediate kind of imagining that's shared with each other about what they're hearing. Did you run this experiment outside of the U.S. as well? Yes, we were able through funding from the National Science Foundation, to also run it in a remote village in China. And there what we saw is that in exactly the same way, people have these ready narrative imaginings that are very similar to one another. but what comes to mind is very different than what the U.S. participants imagine. Yeah, what did the participants in China imagine?

So there we had a sorrowful romantic loss. I mean, that's – okay, so romantic is different than cowboy, but sorrowful feels like a lonely cowboy to me. We're not that far off. Right. Those two are in the same sentimental universe, but differences in the kind of concrete semantic details. We have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to do another example, and we're going to talk about whether musicians daydream differently. Don't go away.

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You know, I know I've said it before, but I really mean it Science Friday can only continue with your support. That's science Friday.com slash donate and thanks. Okay, I want to do one more experiment. So listeners, we're going to play another clip. lock in and think about what this piece evokes. Okay, for me, I'm getting candlestick in the library vibes. That's really in the same direction as what our participant said, although I would say milder. People tended to imagine someone alone in a house getting stalked by a murderer.

Whoa. And this was, so, okay, so, and this was across your two sites in America. America. Exactly. Yes. And, you know, this is, we saw this in one place coming up again and again and again. We were so surprised that, you know, before believing these results, we wanted to run it again in a completely different geographic location and different state. And we did that. And in came, you know, these same reports of sinister home stalking. Did you run this in this village in rural China as well? We did. Yes, we were able to take these same excerpts and bring them to this village in rural China where people speak dong. And for this particular excerpt, you know, for all the excerpts, they queued stories very easily. And people within the village tended to produce stories that were very similar to other people in the village for particular excerpts. And in this case, the story that people reported was having fun outside playing games with friends, which seems really far from the U.S.

imagining. What does that tell you? What we think is happening here is that if you are a listener in the U.S., you might care a lot about the fact that this excerpt is atonal and be kind of blinded to other aspects of it. So by atonal, I just mean it's not kind of following these patterns that let you make sense of a particular key that it's in or something like that. Whereas the listeners in this village ostensibly cared less about the fact that it was atonal and could kind of clue in instead to the fact that it has these really short notes that jump back and forth between high and low registers. When you start thinking of it that way, you can see how it reads as playful. And sort of the broader point that I think emerges here is that we have these stable networks of association that emerge across lifetimes of exposure to sounds that can kind of surface and surprise us. But that it really is this shared kind of current of association and meaning that we're all kind of living within that can fluctuate and change dynamically with time and place and the kinds of patterns that we're experiencing.

in our lives, but can also be stable enough to be really interesting. Yeah, it's shared within a community, but maybe not shared necessarily more broadly. That's exactly right. The specific response. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're a musician.

Do you and other musicians experience musical daydreams differently? I started getting curious about this phenomenon because my students were describing it to when we were talking. You didn't have them yourself? Well, I'd been brainwashed to a certain extent by getting extensive formal training in a conservatory setting, right? I was a classical pianist. And so I'd really been trained to listen in this other kind of way and lost touch a little bit, I think, with this intuitive kind of response. How did you listen? Tell me, explain the difference. You know, to be honest, really critically often, right? You know, like what's going on with that phrasing, I would have done that differently, right? Or, you know, in more charitable cases,

you know, listening to things about how it was put together, right, and how this part relates to that part, just really up in the notes. And I'm in no way saying that that's not an incredibly valuable way of engaging with music. I just think there's this other way of listening that our studies have shown is really widespread and really powerful for people that I had, lost sight of to a certain extent. Do you musically daydream now? Absolutely 100%. I am reformed. What takes you there? I've had a bunch of really special experiences with my teenage children, especially, and with my parents to a certain extent as well, where we've been on long road trips. They've shared me the music they love. And it's this incredible opportunity for really getting behind

into their ears and kind of get a sense of what they're hearing in a piece. Sometimes it's uncannily surprisingly shared, and that's very fun. Sometimes it's divergent in a way that helps me learn and stretch and become less crusty and become more connected to my children. That's very sweet. Does this, does your work into musical daydreams give us any insight into collective concert experiences. For instance, we had the bassist from Fish on recently, and we talked all about flow state and how those shows are all about finding flow for the musicians and the audience, I think. Is that just a shared musical daydream? Or what are your thoughts on that? We have actually looked at these experiences in live concerts. And we find the same

phenomenon that, you know, when people are together in a hall, what they're imagining during one song is more similar to each other than what they're imagining across different songs. So it's, you know, music driven in this same way. And I think what's lovely there is, you know, in one sense, we're kind of in our own inner experience in terms of what we're hearing. And the other, we're co-present, right? We're really alive with other people. And the fact that there's some thread between the, you know, real, the shared reality of occupying, space together and the kind of inner experience I think amplifies some of the power that we find in those those experiences.

Are daydreams good for us? A hundred percent, yes, we need. Are you biased, though, Elizabeth. The literature shows they're good for us. And, you know, that they're increasingly rare, right? Our opportunities for letting our mind drift are reduced to the extent that we We have scrolling video feeds, right? We're just constantly sticking stimuli in front of ourselves.

No, we need to kind of have this opportunity to rovingly make sense of our, you know, disparate experiences and get practice in the kind of storytelling that helps us make sense of our worlds. I mean, is that why the, is that what the literature says that that's why they're good for us as a way to process our experience? Or is it, you know, are there chemical benefits too? Right. Well, I mean, so we know that there are, for example, clinical conditions where the patterns of spontaneous thought are changed in ways that are harmful. So think of depression and anxiety when you might be stuck on kind of a ruminating thought. And so what's lovely about just a song is that it's so accessible, you can just kind of press play and jumpstart some totally different thoughtscape. And that kind of movement and flow, from, you know, one state to another can be really important for well-being, for creativity, and all these kinds of desirable states.

Do you feel like we should be dosing ourselves with music to cope with our extremely stressful world? I think we already dose ourselves with music to cope with our extremely stressful world. I think there's a lot of intuitive use of music as a tool for mood regulation and for, you know, just transportation. All right, Elizabeth, what song should we play out? What's the song that you think would make the most listeners go into musical daydream mode? Wow, what a great question. What's the Enya song that they're playing at my kids' daycare whenever my kids were trying to go to sleep? I feel like that's a good one.

Elizabeth Margulis is director of Princeton's Music Cognition Lab. She's also the author of Transported the Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis, and if listening to Science Friday makes you feel a certain type of way, let us know. Leave us a review, obviously, five stars only. Please, we'll get you next time. I'm Floral Laketon.