What Happens to Your Brain When You Daydream to Music?

Elizabeth Margulis has spent much of her life at the piano, steeped in the disciplined world of conservatory training. But it was only later — through years of teaching and listening closely to her students — that she began to question the rigid assumptions she’d absorbed about what it means to actually listen to music.

“There was a little bit of a reeducation I experienced across the course of my adult life,” she says, “that really revealed to me how important inattention can actually be to musical experience, and how rich the experiences are that people can have when they think they’re not listening to the music at all.”

That perspective is at the heart of her new book, Transported, which explores an underappreciated aspect of musical life: the inner wanderings of the mind when we think we’re not paying attention.

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Margulis, professor and acting chair of the Department of Music, says she believes that inattention is not a failure of listening, but one of its richest forms. Music, she argues, often works best when it loosens our grip on the present and ferries us into private, vivid, and sometimes surprising daydreams. Those moments when our thoughts drift — on the subway, in a concert hall, with headphones on in bed — are cognitive work, not distractions.

Take the 2016 romantic musical comedy film La La Land, which ends with a long, dialogue-free imagined scene. As Ryan Gosling’s character begins to play the piano, the world around Emma Stone’s character dissolves, pulling viewers into an alternate life. But as soon as the music stops, the fantasy collapses, and she’s back in a dim basement bar. That’s how music works, Margulis says: “You’re off in your own head, in this sensorially rich world, carried there by the music, whether you know it or not.”

The book builds off research Margulis has done in the Music Cognition Lab. In one experiment, Margulis and her collaborators bring people into the lab, play them unfamiliar pieces of music, and ask them to describe what they imagined. Using natural language processing to analyze these narratives, the team has found that listeners exposed to the same music often conjure surprisingly similar kinds of stories — despite experiencing them as intensely personal.

In brain imaging studies, Margulis has shown that particular musical excerpts can elicit distinct patterns of activation in the brain’s default mode network, a system associated with spontaneous thought, mind-wandering, and a sense of self.

The book also ventures far beyond Western concert halls. With support from the National Science Foundation, Margulis conducted research in a remote cluster of villages that speak the Dong language in Guizhou, China, where residents have had very limited exposure to Western media. Villagers there readily imagined stories when listening to music, and their narratives converged with each other — but diverged sharply from those of American listeners. An ominous passage that Americans heard as a stalker scenario, for instance, was experienced by villagers as friends playing happily outside. These contrasts, she argues, open up a powerful way to “get behind the ears” of others and talk across cultural and generational divides.

The modern world may make it harder to find the time and space for this kind of inner wandering, Margulis says. Spare moments are now often filled by scrolling, but music may function as a “last refuge for the daydream,” that allows the mind to roam freely. She is interested in how music’s capacity to shift interior thoughts could translate into clinical settings for people with anxiety, depression, or dementia. “Music kind of reduces things down to just this one sensory dimension,” she says. “It provides this space to go inward and have this roving mental experience that is increasingly rare.”