There is value in getting lost in music. Science indicates music and our brains can have a special relationship. Lisa Margulis writes about this in her upcoming book, "Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams." Margulis is a professor of music and director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Before Princeton, she was a member of the music faculty at the University of Arkansas. Her new book explores how music and our minds benefit from musical daydreams.
She says a musical daydream is any time you're listening to music and lapse into a series of mental images, recollections or thoughts that take you elsewhere.
Lisa Margulis: Maybe you're remembering something that happened to you when you were a kid, or picturing some room that's different than the room you're in. So any of these kinds of experiences where while listening to music, you're taken someplace else.
Kyle Kellams: You don't always necessarily realize that's happening.
Margulis: Exactly. And in fact, this is one of the fun journeys of my scholarly life, was really not paying much attention to these experiences for quite a long period and thinking about music really hard without kind of acknowledging this dimension. And it was really students actually at the University of Arkansas who helped tune me in to how important and widespread this experience can be while listening to music.
Kellams: Part of your early life in music was at a conservatory in Baltimore, and that's where you were focused on music, the notes, the schemes, the development. And that's not what we're talking about with the musical daydream.
Margulis: Exactly. In fact, I think a lot of classical training tends to involve kind of erecting all this scaffolding for engaging with sounds in a way that doesn't leave much room for this kind of daydreaming. But once I kind of reconnected with this impulse, I came to see how much value it actually has and that I'd been missing something even while I was gaining something.
Kellams: So you mentioned value because often when someone mentions daydream, especially if you were younger and someone was older and they would say you're daydreaming, it would have a negative connotation, as if it's something that's wasting your time. We're finding out now through actual science that daydreaming can be very good for us.
Margulis: That's exactly right. And in fact, in 2026, we might point to a lack of daydreams as an actual legitimate problem. It tends to be that whenever we're in some kind of low-attention, understimulating environment, we kind of lapse into this particular state of mind where we're thinking through things that might happen in the future, remembering things that happened to us in the past. And that's actually a really important fundamental mechanism you need for understanding yourself and making sense of the kinds of experiences you're having. And so nowadays, when we so often have a screen stuffed in front of our face and we just always have some kind of input, we're really not leaving room for that kind of practice in sense-making and integration to happen.
Kellams: Studying how music, how daydreaming, how and what it can do for us — this sort of study is relatively new, isn't it?
Margulis: Absolutely. Although it's interesting if you look back kind of into the archive and look at how people are talking about music in print over the past decades and even centuries, you end up finding lots of accounts of this kind of experience. And you even watch a couple of times throughout the history of science, this sort of coming to the forefront and then kind of disappearing. It reminds me a little bit of the trajectory around earworms — the kind of songs that get stuck in your head — where we have lots of good evidence this has been happening to people for a really long time, but people were just not feeling good about really giving this serious attention. And it took kind of naming it and working on it to really understand how interesting it was and how much you could learn from focusing on that phenomenon. So for me, music-evoked daydreams are just another example of that kind of experience that might seem trivial, yet there's so much we can learn from it.
Kellams: I'm speaking with Lisa Margulis about her book, "Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams." The book is a lot about music, but what I love about this is it's letting those of us who aren't scientists, who aren't researchers, see just the steps you have to take to be confident in research and the cross-checking and the checking with colleagues. Why is it important for us to know how hard researchers and scientists work before they release their studies?
Margulis: Kyle, I'm so glad you said that, because that is an absolute shadow goal that I had throughout this book — just communicating the texture of what it's like to try to do rigorous scientific research about culturally embedded phenomena. Because I think it just brings up so many interesting challenges that can really help us see the potential that science has, that these methods can yield insight into things that at first glance might seem not the province of science whatsoever.
Kellams: There are examples where, OK, we had different people listen to different music, we wanted them to tell us what they were feeling, but we wanted to mix it up. And it seems like you and your colleagues are completing one step and then instantly second-guessing what you did and wanting to do it a different way to see if you get similar results.
Margulis: That's exactly right. Because if you look at the history of psychological work on music, you can find a lot of errors, like a lot of mistakes that actually had some pretty consequential real-world impact. I'll give you an example of that, which is research that came out in the early 1990s that fed into this idea about a Mozart effect. There was a study that showed that if you played college students an excerpt from Mozart's Two Piano Sonata before they did a spatial reasoning task, they did a little bit better on that task than if they hadn't listened to something beforehand. And basically the end result of that now, even 30 years later, is pretty much any baby toy you buy is going to play a little Mozart tune for you. There are even initiatives from state legislatures and governments to only license daycares if they played a certain amount of classical music. Whereas in reality, it turns out that was really just an arousal effect. It's like if you listen to any moderately upbeat, fast-tempo music, you're more alert, and so you perform better on a test that immediately follows that. But you can get the same effect by listening to any music that has those properties or by walking on a treadmill. So it's not something magical about Mozart. And if you're not careful about the kind of interpretive leaps you make, you can get into some very wrong kinds of misunderstandings.
Kellams: I love the work that you did with students at the University of Arkansas, but also residents of what I guess we'd call a somewhat remote village in China. Can you summarize somewhat how you did that work?
Margulis: Absolutely. Basically, back in Arkansas, we had people coming into a booth one at a time, listening to excerpts that we'd already normed — so we knew they had not heard these excerpts before. And just asking them to freely tell us what story they imagined while they were listening. And when we looked at what they produced — I mean, it's a free response task, so this should be wildly divergent, right? People should be doing all kinds of idiosyncratic things. And just one after another, they were describing more or less the same imagining for these individual excerpts they hadn't heard before. This was very shocking to us. And our first step was to call some colleagues at Michigan State University and be like, what do you think is going on? And they're like, oh, maybe people are talking to one another and they're influencing each other's answers. Just send us the files and we'll run it here. And so they ran it in East Lansing, having people come into a soundproof booth and do the same thing with these same excerpts. And up came just literally the exact same imagery that people had been producing in Arkansas.
So there we knew, OK, this is a real phenomenon. People's imaginations are highly constrained by the sounds that they're listening to. Let's see if we can understand more about the mechanism there. It seems like maybe experience with media is playing some kind of role here. How can we suss that out? And the idea was to go to a place where the media exposure would be really different than the media exposure that people had had in East Lansing and in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And so we linked up with some colleagues that I had worked with in the past at Chinese University of Hong Kong, who had a relationship with a community that was a village in rural China where people don't speak Mandarin, they speak Dong, and just generally report no exposure to Western media at all.
And I want to make it kind of sound like we just did that, but in fact we had to get the National Science Foundation to think this was a good idea and give us funding, and arrange everything and go there and figure out translating to Mandarin into Dong and then back out. I mean, this is a big logistical kind of effort. But we were ultimately able to go there and perform the same study. And what was so interesting is that people within this community were spontaneously producing imaginings that were very similar to others from that community, but totally different from what we'd been hearing in Arkansas and Michigan.
So the way I think about this is that there are these kind of shared imaginings that people can have while they're listening to music, but that that's contingent on a particular kind of life experience going into that listening session. And presumably this would even be the case within a geographic location, if you were looking at things with a fine enough lens — that you'd be able to see that people who've spent all their time listening to one genre of music end up doing something more similar than people who listen to other genres of music. And that's kind of the topic that we're engaged with now.
Kellams: And that influence of media — I think since Hitchcock's "Psycho," when we hear a certain kind of music, especially here in the West, that is not the traditional melodies and harmonies, we tend to think of it as something scary or brutal or cataclysmic. Whereas people who don't generally listen to Western styles of music might hear that music as celebratory. And I think that's incredibly interesting.
Margulis: Exactly. And that's exactly what we found. We had an excerpt that people in East Lansing and in Fayetteville were sure meant that a murder was about to happen. And people in this village in China thought it sounded like playing outside and having fun with your friends and playing games. And what's interesting is when you listen to that excerpt, it's this kind of fun thought experiment where you try to get yourself into the ears of hearing that as joyful. I can't say exactly what led to that experience, but I have really good speculation about it, because in this particular excerpt, there are these really short notes that are jumping back and forth between high and low registers. And if you just kind of get over the fact that it's atonal, it's not doing the ordinary progressions that you're used to — that in and of itself can sound quite playful. So it almost feels like, because they weren't limited by this kind of association between atonal music and horror, they were able to tap into something that was kind of more interesting about the music in many ways.
Kellams: Are there benefits from finding out that, oh, when I hear that song from 1978, it instantly takes me back to my first kiss, or it instantly takes me back to something? Is there potential — and we may not know that fully — the potential of what we can learn about how music and our brains work together?
Margulis: Absolutely. I think there's both really interesting implications for just the basic science of how human memory works, but also really interesting potential applications. So if you think about people experiencing dementia, for example, if you've got a way to conjure up some memory from a very self-defining period of life that's very close to kind of informing somebody's identity, and you can do that simply by putting on headphones and playing a person a song from a certain part of their life — that's a really powerful potential intervention. Same thing for other disorders where stuck thoughts are a part of it. So I'm thinking here of things like depression and anxiety where people will be told things like, well, go outside and get some fresh air and get some new input into the system. And that can be really hard to do when you're in one of these states. Whereas listening to a song is a really low-barrier-to-entry intervention that can kind of jump-start thoughts and imaginings in a new direction that can potentially be useful in those kinds of conditions as well.
Kellams: Sometimes a song takes you back to a specific place and you might ruminate on it, but often a musical daydream, you're thinking forward, you're thinking in different directions. And I get from your book that those are two kind of distinct experiences with music. One, daydreaming allows you to plan and think non-linearly, whereas the memory, the milepost effect just takes you back to a certain place. Do I have that right?
Margulis: Yeah, exactly. But I also think it's interesting the way memories get fleshed out in these creative ways that aren't quite exactly replays in the way that we might assume. Similarly, the kinds of fantastical things that we might be daydreaming about while listening are often structured in these interesting ways by concrete experiences that we have had, or things we've seen on television or in movies or what have you. So I would say that my work in this area has tended to muddy the waters between memory and imaginings in my own way of thinking.
Kellams: Lisa, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it so much.
Margulis: Thank you.
Lisa Margulis is a professor of music and director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Her upcoming book, to be published later this spring, is "Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams."
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