The Benefits of Mind Wandering

WNYC Studios is supported by Columbia University Press, publisher of What Science Says Aout Astrology by Carlos Orsi You may have heard the recent interview on Code Switch with Carlo Sorsi b why astrology appeals to so many people despite having no backing by scientific evidence What makes astrology so appealing and persuasive Is there any harm to believing in astrology anyway Carlos Orsi explores the importance of astrology to the history of science and the reasons it's been categorized as a pseudoscience bothoth empathy and skepticism OrC illuminates the psychological and emotional mechanisms that cause people to find astrological predictions convincing She also addresses the dangers of irrational beliefs and the risks of applying astrology to serious decisions Wide ranging and entertaining, What Science Says about astrology is the first book in the new What Science says series. Available now wherever books are sold. 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On view until september sixth, learn more at posterhouse. org slash stududios Yeah 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. T many time. G Sving T your heart Be done Okay. I'm thirteen 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. Dror 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 Day Dreams. Elizabeth, thanks for being here Thanks so much for having me Do you have a relationship with Dave Matthew's band U 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 go out on a limb and guess that you literally were in a Saints's 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 like a smell. Exactly bring 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 and 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. 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 Exactly 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 tumblewed involved. And what's so interesting here is that's actually an example of Chinese art music So not a cowboy, notot a Western tune is what 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 US 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 exactly the same way people have these ready narrative imaginings that are very similar to one another. 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. So I mean, that's okay so romantic is different than cowboy, but sorrowful It feels like cowboy to me.s 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 gonna do another example, and we're gonna talk about whether musicians daydream differently took away Hey, Flora here, we are wrapping up Science Friday's fiscal year on june thirtieth and we could use your support. We're aiming to raise one hundred thousand dollars to close out our budget And with your help I know we can do it if science Friday is valuable to you, if you rely on our reporting to make sense of the world Or even just to give you your daily dose of joy and wonder, please consider going to sciencefriday d. com slash donate to make a donation. 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Go to join deleteme dot com slash Friday and use promo code Friday at checkout That's join deeleteme d. com slash Friday, code Friday WNYC Studios is supported by Columbia University Press, publisher of What Science Says Aout Astrology by Carlos Orsi You may have heard the recent interview on Code Switch with Carlo Sorsi about why astrology appeals to so many people despite having no backing by scientific evidence What makes astrology so appealing and persuasive Is there any harm to believing in an astrology anyway Carlos Orci explores the importance of astrology to the history of science, and the reasons it's been categorized as a pseudoscience bothoth empathy and skepticism OrC illuminates the psychological and emotional mechanisms that cause people to find astrological predictions convincing He also addresses the dangers of irrational beliefs and the risks of applying astrology to serious decisions Wide ranging and entertaining, what Science Says about astrology is the first book in the new What Science says series, available now wherever books are sold 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 Yeah. Okay, for me, I'm getting candlestick in the library That's really in the same direction as what our participants said, although I would say milder. People tended to imagine someone alone in a house getting stalked I a murderer Whoa. And this was so okay, so and this was across your two sites in America Exactly. yes. And you know, this is we saw this in one place. comoming up again and again and again, we were so surprised that before believing these results, we wanted to run it again in a completely different geographic location, a different state And we did that and in came, you know these same reports of sinister home stocking 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, And you know, for all of the excerpts, They cued 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 Re they're from the U.S. imily What does that tell you What we think is happening here is that if you are a listener in the US, 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 a tonal 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 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 be 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. the specific response. Exactly. 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 me when we were. you didn't have them yourself? Well, I've 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. And how did you listen? Tell me explain the No, 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