Why Humans Crave Rituals & How Music Transports Your Mind

A lot of people treat melatonin like a harmless sleeping pill. But that’s not really what it is. Researchers are increasingly concerned that melatonin is misunderstood, overused, and often taken in ways that may not help sleep much at all. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9892750/ Humans have always relied on rituals to mark important moments in life—weddings, funerals, graduations, religious ceremonies, even small personal traditions. Rituals help create meaning, connection, and a sense of belonging. Yet many traditional rituals are fading as fewer people marry, attend religious services, or follow long-standing customs. At the same time, entirely new rituals are emerging all over the world to fill that void. Bruce Feiler joins me to explain why rituals matter so deeply to humans, why we continue creating them even when old traditions disappear, and how rituals may be more important to our emotional wellbeing than most people realize. Bruce is author of A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us (https://amzn.to/4nrtvtP) Have you ever heard a song that instantly transported you somewhere else? Suddenly you’re reliving a memory, imagining a scene, or feeling emotions that seem almost cinematic. Those experiences are called musical daydreams—and they happen far more often than most people realize. What’s fascinating is that people from completely different backgrounds often report remarkably similar experiences when listening to the same music. Elizabeth Margulis, professor of music at Princeton University and director of the Music Cognition Lab, explains why music has this unusual power over the mind, how musical daydreams work, and what they reveal about the way humans experience emotion and imagination. She is author of Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams (https://amzn.to/4tDmqrL). Closing your eyes while kissing feels natural and romantic. But why does it actually feel strange to keep your eyes open during a passionate kiss? Neuroscience suggests there may be a very specific reason your brain prefers eyes you NOT watch what you are doing. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/why-we-kiss-with-eyes-closed-psychologists-research-a6943731.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 AQUA TRU: Take the guesswork out of pure, great-tasting water. Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://AquaTru.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK. AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back. RULA: This Mental Health Awareness Month, don’t just think about your mental health - actually take the step to take care of it. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your everyday with luxury you will actual use! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL: With the Dell Pro laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra with vPro, no matter how many interruptions you have, your laptop won’t be one of them. With battery that’s optimized for the way you work, and built-in intelligence that quiets distractions the moment you’re trying to focus, your tech won’t slow you down. Find out more at ⁠⁠https://Dell.com/Dell-Pro⁠⁠ SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 0:30Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, the problem with melatonin if you take it to help you sleep better. Then rituals. We've been celebrating rituals forever, but something's changed.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  We are in this incredible renaissance of new rituals around the world, like organ donation, or adoption, divorce, cancer versaries, sober versaries. There is this desire, let's find new ways to be together.

• 0:59Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why you almost always close your eyes when you kiss someone. And the fascinating power and science of musical daydreams. What are they?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Whenever you're listening to music, and the world around you fades a little bit, and you get lost in a memory, something that happened to you in the distant past, or an imagining of something that's never happened to you, that is a musical daydream.

• 1:25Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in shop cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in shop cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website,

• 2:10Mike Carruthers?

  you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000,

• 2:29Mike Carruthers?

  I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. You know, melatonin has become one of the most popular sleep aids in America.

• 3:13Mike Carruthers?

  But did you know that many sleep experts say it's often misunderstood and overused, especially for insomnia? It's the first topic on this episode of Something You Should Know. I'm Mike Carruthers, welcome. So, melatonin is not really a sleeping pill. It's a hormone your body naturally produces to help regulate your internal clock. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, there is no strong evidence that melatonin works well for chronic insomnia in otherwise healthy adults. It appears to help more with timing problems like jet lag or shift work than it does for people who simply can't sleep.

• 3:54Mike Carruthers?

  Recent reviews suggest the benefits for insomnia are modest at best. There's also growing concern about long-term and unsupervised use, particularly in children. Researchers have reported a dramatic rise in accidental melatonin overdoses and emergency room visits involving children. Studies have found that some melatonin supplements contain far more melatonin than the label claims. Sleep specialists say that before turning to melatonin, most people would benefit more from improving their sleep habits, like keeping a regular bedtime, reducing your evening screen exposure, cutting out coffee at night, and addressing stress and anxiety that interfere with sleep.

• 4:39Mike Carruthers?

  And that is something you should know.

• 4:44Mike Carruthers?

  Humans, when you think about it, are deeply ritualistic creatures. Weddings, funerals, birthdays, graduations, holiday celebrations. Across every culture and throughout history, people have created rituals to mark important moments and bring people together. But something interesting has happened. Many of the traditional rituals that once structured our lives have weakened or disappeared altogether. Fewer people get married, fewer participate in organized religion, and many classic rites of passage have faded away. And yet, the need for ritual hasn't gone away.

• 5:25Mike Carruthers?

  In fact, my guest says we may actually be living through a kind of ritual renaissance, where people are inventing entirely new ways to gather, connect, celebrate, grieve, and create meaning. So what makes a ritual different from a habit or a routine? Why do rituals have such a powerful effect on us emotionally? And could rebuilding ritual be one answer to the loneliness and disconnection so many people feel today? Bruce Feiler has traveled the world exploring these questions. He's the author of several bestselling books. His latest is called "A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us." Hi Bruce, welcome back.

• 6:09Mike Carruthers?

  Good to have you on Something You Should Know Again.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Hi there, my nice to be with you. Thank you for inviting me.

• 6:14Mike Carruthers?

  So what is a ritual? What makes something a ritual?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Well, that question turns out to be quite controversial, but because there's there's different kinds of rituals. There's political rituals like inaugurations and coronations. There's calendric rituals like Thanksgiving or May Day. There's daily rituals like shaking hands and, you know, namaste or bowing or something like that. But what I'm talking about here are rituals that can connect us and bring us together, like all rituals. So my definition is a ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  So let's break that down. It's an act because we're doing something. We're not just talking about it. It's shared because it connects us and we have 300,000 years of evidence that this is the essential human act that that helps us to have a sense of belonging and meaning which somebody want. But also rituals are unnecessary. Like you don't need to get down on one knee in order to propose to someone or wear black in order to mourn. And yet, these unnecessities become necessary because we we invest them with a lot of meaning and symbolism. But to me, the most important thing and really why I undertook this project is they make us feel at home.

• 7:33Mike Carruthers?

  So the only thing about your definition that I want, and this may be a rabbit hole. We don't need to go down. But you said it's a shared experience. But you know, I sometimes think about, you know, athletes will do a little ritual before they they're not sharing it. They're just doing it for themselves. Is that not a ritual?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  In some ways, the big arc that I went on in the course of working on this project is at the beginning, I was very interested in the conversation we're having now, like, what's a ritual and what's not a ritual and what does the data show? And how long have humans been doing this? And what I've come to realize is we are being pulled apart, right? We are facing, you know, decivilization in a lot of ways. And so to me, the most important thing that we need right now is to develop a ritual state of mind, right? And 100 years ago, when this ritual sort of became a thing that people talked about, they talked about the big four life rituals, right? Those were birth and coming of age and marriage and then and then death.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  But if you don't get married and have children, as many people don't, you can go most of your life without a kind of pre-approved life rituals. And I learned this from my kids in a lot of ways. When they left home and went to college, when they're home, like, we need to lurch at every opportunity to connect and be together. And so I can't say, well, sorry, the textbook written 100 years ago says this is not a ritual. We need any moment. We need to embrace any opportunity to connect. So right now, at the end of this project and sort of now that I'm offering a time to gather into the world, I'll say, anything that gives you a sense of belonging and meaning and purpose and connection, that's a ritual in my book, and I'm much less concerned with where I started.

• 9:20Mike Carruthers?

  And it seems as if, I mean, you would know best, but rituals go back forever, right? I mean, as long as there have been humans, there have been rituals, I imagine.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that that's a really important question. We tend to think that religion created ritual, but in fact, it's the other way around. We have evidence going back 300,000 years in cave paintings all over this planet that the first essential human act was gathering people together to honor the dead. And we would begin to do these rituals of mating, of mourning, of renewing, of kind of remaking the group. And then we would make stories to tell them so they could be replicable. And that, in a lot of ways, is what created organized religion. So now, if we jump to the present, we're in this interesting moment, as we all know, right? So we have, a lot of us, still define

• 10:09Speaker 02

  ourselves as being religious and being believers and belonging in communities. But a lot of people are spiritual but not religious, and some people are entirely irreligious. But what's happening, and what motivated me to do this project to begin with, is that we are in this incredible renaissance of new rituals around the world. So things that we never honored before in organized religion, like organ donation or adoption, not just marriage, but divorce, not just fertility, but infertility, cancer versaries, sober versaries, your first phone, on and on and on. And so I think that what's happening

• 10:48Speaker 02

  is there is this groundswell desire to, let's find new ways to be together. And it's, I call it the ritual renaissance. And it's absolutely inspiring because it shows us at this moment, at this exact moment, when everyone thinks that AI is going to destroy us and our algorithms are going to divide us, that there's going to be a human response to all of that. And the humans know we must be together. There's countless, hundreds and hundreds of studies that show that rituals help us reduce stress in times of change, feel connected to those we're doing these experiences with, and also that the more we invest in these experiences... The more we take out of them.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So what inspires me is the call that this makes to all of us to find new ways, whatever it is, loss of a company, loss of a job, you know, retiring, entering a new phase of life, moving, these are all new rituals that are popping up as we find new ways to respond to all the ways that we feel divided.

• 11:53Mike Carruthers?

  But it seems to me that once a ritual catches on in a big way, like marriage, coming together when someone dies, graduation, once they become part of the culture, they stick around for a long, long time.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  They do last. The impulse lasts, the mechanism changes. I mean, here's a perfect example, one of the big four, and one of the ones that anybody would think of when we talk about rituals would be rituals around death. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Today, it's 65% and going to 80%. And only one of the, and four of those is buried, and only one in five has a ceremony or celebration of life of any kind. And so this is an example of how our customs change. Just yesterday, as we tape this conversation, just yesterday, I attended a celebration of life for my 62-year-old sister-in-law who died of leukemia. She died a few weeks back.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  All of us rushed to Atlanta to say goodbye. Unfortunately, most of us who were traveling from afar were unable to say goodbye. And so we found ourselves in the home that she shared with my brother. And my brother said, oh, why don't we sit around and share memories of Laura? And I said, that's a wonderful idea. Let's go a step further and make it a ritual, right? So let's open the circle. We then lit a candle that was the first piece of art that they bought together. We shared stories. At the end, I said, let's close the circle. And then he brought out a book, an old version of The Owl and the Pussycat, that she had given my brother on the occasion of their wedding, and we read it together. And so just those simple steps of let's be intentional about this,

• 13:37Speaker 02

  let's form a kind of Sacred space and then let's hold space and show empathy for my brother. Bringing in the sort of blueprint of ritual that I discovered in my in my travels to 16 countries on six continents made the occasion more special. So three weeks later, we had a celebration of life because, like many people today, she was cremated. And so I think that there's an example of the impulse is the same in almost every way, shape and form. It felt like a ritual and yet at the same time, it was not what you and I grew up with, which was a top down, pre-scripted, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, enforced ritual. It was bottom up.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  It met us where we were and it allowed all of us to have a sense that we are contributing to it. We're not just reading a pre-approved script.

• 14:31Mike Carruthers?

  And rituals are so common and so popular because what do they do for people? What is it when you had this ritual with your sister-in-law's death? You do it because why? I mean, is it for you or is it to show respect for somebody else or all of the above? Or what's the point?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I think that that's a really important question. It's a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. I think first and foremost, it is a sense of safety. When do people do rituals? They do rituals in times of change. Okay, someone comes into the group like a baby or like a marriage. When someone leaves the group like a coming of age or a death. When someone moves, when someone gets sick. When there's a change in the group, the group is somewhat aimless. Or as one death doula I spoke to said, there's a kind of gray murky directionlessness in the group where no one quite knows where to sit, what to say, how to stand, how to express themselves. So we are sort of containerless in these moments of change and we all know that these

• 15:39Speaker 02

  moments are hastening and quickening. What the ritual does is it creates a container. So it's a sort of safe space, a sense of time outside of time or. Place outside of place, inside of which we can be confused, but we are held. We are, you know, empathized with. We are supported and uplifted in this moment of change and confusion. Because we know when there's a wedding, suddenly everybody has to do a slightly different role in the family when there's a death. Often, the roles that the deceased played have to be reassigned to everyone else. And so that's what the rituals do. They reduce the stress, okay? They make us feel seen, respected, loved and heard.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  And then they allow us to reconstitute ourselves. So it's a, it's, it is the human response to the pain and confusion around change that turns, as one ritual designer told me, that the most important thing is to change fear into hope.

• 16:40Mike Carruthers?

  Well, in a second, I want to ask you more about that because I can think of a lot of rituals that don't seem to have fear in them.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 17:45Mike Carruthers?

  We're discussing rituals and the role they play in our lives. Bruce Feiler is my guest. He is author of a book called "A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us." So Bruce, you said one of the roles of rituals is to change fear into hope. But I can think of a lot of rituals that don't have fear, like getting married or putting up the Christmas tree. It's just a reason for people to get together and celebrate.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I might actually somewhat push back in the way you're gently pushing back on me. I think that rituals mark time. So if you are putting up the Christmas tree, you're looking at the old ornaments, you're reconnecting to the past, you begin to realize that maybe someone's getting a little older, okay? Or maybe someone is experiencing this in a different way. And that is a way of marking time. So a lot of what goes on in a ritual, and this may be one of the most fascinating and surprising and to me satisfying things I learned, and that is, sure, they connect us, sure, they create togetherness, but also rituals reduce conflict. There is conflict in any one of these occasions, okay? Someone wants to put the mistletoe on this way.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Somebody else wants to do that. Someone wants a natural tree. Someone wants an artificial tree. And the ritual forces us to broker those conflicts, okay? You and I are getting married. You want a big wedding. I want a small wedding, okay? I want outdoor. You want indoor. We want different kinds of music. If you can bury these tensions underground, the rituals surface the conflict and then help us resolve the conflict. The ritual is a mechanism of compromise, and that's, of course, exactly how groups stay together.

• 19:33Mike Carruthers?

  Can you give me an example of a new ritual that seems to strike a chord that people like that we just didn't used to do?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  My wife's favorite chapter in A Time Together is called The Taylor Swift Divorce Party. And it's about a woman who grew up, her parents and both sets of grandparents were divorced. And she said, "I'm not going to get divorced." What happened? You can imagine. She grew up, had children, she got divorced. And when her husband left, she put all the belongings in the middle of the, he took half the belongings, she took all the rest, and she gave them away to charity. And she said, "You know what I need right now? I need a divorce registry, because I need a new, I need new plates, I need new sheets, I need a new toothbrush holder that every time I walk into the bathroom doesn't say, 'Oh, loser, you're divorced.'" And so she started the world's first divorce registry, and she realized that people wanted

• 20:25Speaker 02

  an occasion to mark this moment, because it was formally a moment of shame and disgrace. And she said, "You can be unhappy that your divorce ended, but still not believe it's the end of your life." And so she wrote a blog post called The Taylor Swift Divorce Party, where she served shake-it-off cupcakes and "we are never ever getting back together," you know, like, had banners and cookies. And she went online, and I said, "How did this happen?" And she said, "Because I went online." And like a lot of women in the early days of the internet, and I said, "My husband's doing this, and my husband is doing that, and I feel ashamed and confused." And other women said, "Well, that's happening to me." Older women got on and said, "Yeah, my husband did that too," and I sort of kept it to myself.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  And the empowerment of being on the internet and feeling confidence is a lot of what's created these, what I call, new rituals around the world. And so it's a way of saying, "We're going to take even this thing that is difficult, and we are going to turn it into a ritual." It's not a celebration of what happened, but it's a celebration of the community that will help you get through it.

• 21:34Mike Carruthers?

  I don't know how to ask this, but I know there are rituals that don't seem to have a lot of meaning in the ritual. It's the act of doing the ritual. Here's an example, it's not a great example, but it'll, it'll make my point. I remember once going to like, I think it was Easter or maybe it was a Christmas church service with a Catholic friend and the whole service was in Latin. Okay, it had no meaning for me and probably had very little meaning to the people sitting there who probably go every year for this. And I'm thinking, why are we doing this? I have no idea what this guy's talking about.

• 22:17Mike Carruthers?

  I have no idea what's going on. And yet, there was something about it that was, I don't know, kinda cool. I mean, it was, it was a ritual, but it, in some ways, it was an empty ritual for me. But I still, I'm glad I went.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  And I want to say a couple of things in response to that. The most important thing, and the first thing I will say, is that pre-scripted foreign language rituals are, that's exactly what people are rebelling against in a lot of ways. And yet, there is, as you say, a kind of, a kind of comfort and meaning in those rituals. I talked to a woman. She started something called the Purple Pundit Project, which actually hosts non-traditional Hindu weddings, and in many cases for LGBTQ families. And she said, you know, the most important guests at the wedding in a lot of ways are not the couple, or not even the parents, it's the aunties.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  And she said that a successful ritual has to pass the auntie sniff test. And I like crazy love this. She's like, it can't be so new that it doesn't have some of the trappings of an old ritual in order to feel like a ritual. And I think that that's a great point. On the other hand, if it's entirely an old ritual, like in her case, the one that she went to where she said, I went to a three-day wedding when I married, this is an Indian woman marrying an Indian man, and she said it was traditional, but my husband had a LGBTQ brother, I was estranged from my father, and in some ways, it didn't really suit us. So the most successful ritual designers that I know, even the people in organized religion,

• 24:02Speaker 02

  are what I call ritual entrepreneurs. They're realizing that they have to adjust.

• 24:06Mike Carruthers?

  So what is the point here in the sense of, are you saying, so embrace your rituals, the more rituals, the better? What is it you want people to get from this?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Well, I would say a few things. I would say that the first and most important thing is be a group keeper. Okay, I belong to the tribe of group keepers. Okay, I'm the one who runs the backyard Olympics. I'm the one who leads the dinner, you know, the family dinner game. I run the family meeting. I'm the keeper of the family stories. This is how you and I first met with Secrets of Happy Families and Life is in the Transition. So like, I'm the group keeper and every group and every family has one or more than one. And so I think that we all need to be group keepers. Okay, we spend so much time talking about self-care, taking care of our own needs, but there need to be people that focus on on taking care of the group. And so I would say lesson number

• 25:00Speaker 02

  one here is be a group keeper. Okay, if you look at the, if you add together the births, deaths, graduations, marriages, cancer diagnoses, lost jobs, and retirements in the United States, every year, the number is 50 million. Globally, it's 1 billion. That's 3 million potential life rituals every day around the world where we could be connecting and reconnecting with one another. So take any of those opportunities and say, I want to raise my hand. I want to hold a gathering. That is the strongest antidote to loneliness. And we can reverse the loneliness epidemic in one generation if we all do this once or twice a year.

• 25:40Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is a really fresh take on a topic that I like. I've always enjoyed rituals, family rituals, any kind of ritual. I think I've always thought they were important, but your view of them and your take on them takes it one step further, which is really great. I've been talking with Bruce Feiler. The name of his book is A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us. And there is a link to his book in the show notes. Bruce, great. Thanks.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. I appreciate the conversation and the serious back and forth. And cheers, and I look forward to seeing you down the road.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 27:15Mike Carruthers?

  Music is strange when you think about it. It does something to us. It can make you cry, calm you down, fire you up, or instantly transport you somewhere else entirely. A song can come on and suddenly you're back in high school, or driving down a highway at night, or imagining some scene that never even happened. And what's fascinating is this isn't rare or weird, it's something humans everywhere seem to do. In fact, researchers are discovering that when we listen to music, we often slip into what are essentially waking dreams, vivid inner movies filled with memories, emotions, fantasies, and imagined futures.

• 27:58Mike Carruthers?

  And those musical daydreams may reveal something profound about how the human mind works, why music is so powerful, and why we seem to need it so much. What's also remarkable is that these experiences we assume are deeply private may not be private at all. Different people, listening to the same music, often imagine surprisingly similar things. So what's going on in the brain when music takes us away like that? And why, in this distracted world where attention is constantly under attack, might music be one of the last places our minds are still free to wander? Here to explain all this is Elizabeth Margulis.

• 28:43Mike Carruthers?

  She is a professor of music at Princeton University, director of the Music Cognition Lab there, and she is author of a book called "Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams." Hi, Elizabeth, welcome.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Thanks so much. Great to be here.

• 28:58Mike Carruthers?

  So, since you study this, explain exactly what a musical daydream is.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Whenever you're listening to music and the world around you fades a little bit, you might not even think you're hearing the sound as closely, and you get lost in a memory, something that happened to you in the distant past or an imagining of something that's never happened to you. So when your mind wanders from focusing on the sound itself into some kind of memory or imagining, that is a musical daydream.

• 29:30Mike Carruthers?

  And typically, is that memory related to that music? I have those kind of, I think, musical daydreams all the time in the sense that when I hear certain songs, it transports me back into a place and a time when I used to listen to that song, when it was popular. Is that a musical daydream?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And this can happen in really unexpected ways, right? Where you forgot a song existed. Maybe you haven't thought about this moment for years, and then it comes on, you know, the stereo when you're at a café or what have you, and suddenly you're back remembering something that happened to you in 11th grade in great, gory detail. And that's something science has been really interested in in recent years, finding that music is a particularly potent cue for this kind of transportive memory.

• 30:27Mike Carruthers?

  And why is that important? What's the so what here? Because I think people have had this experience. But when the song's over, so is the experience and life goes on and that's the end of that.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Right. It's interesting how little attention we tend to pay to these moments. But what we're seeing is that there's a whole bunch of really fascinating structure to what happens here. For example, if I play a song and you get lost in your own personal memory, and I get lost in my own personal memory, when we analyze free response descriptions of these memories, we see that there are characteristics that tend to be broadly shared among people. That is, when we play a specific song, many of us end up getting lost in some memory that's pretty similar from individual to individual. So, a couple

• 31:21Speaker 03

  of consequences. One, there's a real opportunity for connection and mutual understanding here, both about ourselves and about other people. Two, best estimates of how much time we spent in this kind of mind wandering from 10 years back or so are somewhere between a third and half of our day. And that is increasingly rare, that kind of mind wandering state, because we so often have a screen stuck in front of our face, right? Even when we're sitting on the subway or doing dishes, often there's a whole stream of stimuli that we're encountering.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  So, music, I really view it as the last refuge of the daydream in many ways. So, when we're, you know, walking around, listening to songs through headphones, we can still get lost in these kinds of imaginative scenes that turn out to be really fundamental to how our brain works and how we make sense of our life and find meaning.

• 32:25Mike Carruthers?

  So, you just said, I think, that people, two people could listen to the same song and have similar daydreams. That seems very unlikely to me because my memories of that song and the context I put it in, I can't imagine would be anything close to what you do.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is, I would say, the most surprising finding in my entire career. And the way this came about is we had put people inside individual sound attenuated booths, played them excerpts of music that they told us they'd never heard before, asked them to just type out what it was they imagined while they were listening. So now, you know, this experiment's going on for several weeks. We're finished with data collection. I, you know, open up the files, start looking at, you know, what it is that I'm gonna find. And we just found that for the same excerpt, person after person was telling us just an uncannily similar story,

• 33:28Speaker 03

  down to very specific details, like it was a street in the 1920s, right? It's sunrise over a meadow and tiny creatures awaken and start to frolic. Even this word frolic was showing up again and again from person to person. So what's clear is that even though we think we're doing something really idiosyncratic and personal, there's this tight connection between what's happening in the sound and what's happening in our internal thought scape.

• 33:57Mike Carruthers?

  So just so I understand, it's like when you say you're playing this music and people are saying the same thing, basically, about the stories in their mind and their frolic. Frolic is not a word people use a lot. So what kind of music was? It probably wasn't heavy metal. What roughly was this kind of music?

• 34:18Speaker 03

  So for our very first set of studies, we used examples of instrumental art music, right? So this is like orchestral string quartet kind of stuff. And it was building on that in our subsequent studies that we branched out. We used things like Chinese instrumental music. We used electronic dance music, country music, pop music, hip hop. So we kind of started in one domain and then tried to spread out.

• 34:49Mike Carruthers?

  I want to get a better sense of this because I'm not fully grasping it. Can you give me a really specific example of this?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Just imagine, right, you hear it's like a saxophone solo, right? Like a plaintive saxophone solo. Someone might be like, oh, I'm in a dark bar. I'm sitting at the corner, right? So there's these kind of sociocultural scripts where you're likely to encounter certain kinds of sounds. So that's in the case where you get something that feels a little bit like a personal memory, right? But it could also feel like an imagined scenario, like a fantastical scenario, right? Another example of that could be you've got an electronic excerpt, super flowy, right? Has this kind of shimmering timbre.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  In those kinds of cases, we get a lot of descriptions of people talking about feeling like they're floating on the ocean, right? The sun glimmering on the tops of the waves. So there's this kind of immersive experience. So it's not just that you have a certain concept that comes to mind. It's more than that. It's that you have this kind of imagined reliving or quasi-experiential dimension to this imagining. And again, that tends to be robustly shared among individuals for particular excerpts.

• 36:18Mike Carruthers?

  Okay, so I understand it better now. And the saxophone thing did it for me because when I hear that slow saxophone music, I think of like a rainy Sunday afternoon on the street in New York City. But it's not a memory. I've never been on a rainy New York street when saxophone music was playing. It's just what I conjure up. But when I listen to, say, you know, an old Marvin Gaye song, then I go back in my life and I remember where I was and the people I was with when that song was really popular. And that's my memory.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  So maybe the best example of an autobiographical memory, which is what you're describing to music, which I conceptualize under this general umbrella of a musical daydream, comes at the end of La La Land. Have you seen that movie?

• 37:13Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, yeah, I can't, I'm trying to remember the end, but yeah.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  At the end, so remember the character played by Emma Stone and the character played by Ryan Gosling, right? They don't make it. They, they, they do not marry each other. And in fact, the character played by Emma Stone goes on and marries someone else and is, ends up being a very successful actor. And they're kind of strolling around one evening and happen into this jazz club. And it turns out that this is the jazz club that had been founded in the intervening years by Ryan Gosling's character. So they sit down, Ryan Gosling's character comes out on stage and starts playing on the piano this song that he'd been playing in the restaurant when they first met. And then, you know, the camera changes

• 37:59Speaker 03

  and now we're back in that first moment. And then we go through this entire fantastical imagined scenario where instead of breaking up, they stay together, you know, and have this kind of joyful coexistence. And then the camera kind of comes out, the song ends, and we go back to the actual reality in the movie of them sitting in this bar and looking at one another. And, and it's just a really visceral kind of example of having a strong personal memory to music.

• 38:34Mike Carruthers?

  But I want to understand the benefits of this. I mean, you're doing all this research and it is interesting. And, and I think everyone has had the experience of, of listening to music and, and having it do something in your head, change your mood, make you think about something, recall a memory. But are there benefits to this? Are there something beyond the wow, that's interesting?

• 38:59Speaker 03

  So imagine that you are a person that is suffering from dementia, right? And so there's lots of anecdotal evidence and some scientific evidence that if I play you music from your adolescence, that not only can that bring back some kind of memory, right, but it tends to bring back memories that are positive because you tend to listen to music in community with other people, the memories tend to have this social dimension, and they tend to be memories that tell you something about who you are, so that connect to your identity and help you fill in that missing kind of story about what matters to

• 39:42Speaker 03

  you in your life, in a way that now a person with dementia who's listened to this song, perked up, remembered something, has some kind of halo period after listening to it, where there's just more cogency, more ability to communicate and be present with the people around them. So that's an example, that then you dial that back and think about ordinary life, right? And this way that a song can bring back something that is an important part of who you are and how you came to be, you know, the way you are in the world,

• 40:21Speaker 03

  that was latent, right? You couldn't access it until the song kind of reached in and grabbed it out for you. So that's one example. Another example is spontaneous thought is really important to our sense of well-being, to how we experience ourselves in the world. So think about situations like anxiety or depression. Both of these are categorized by stuck thoughts, where it's really hard to get out of the same rut of the thought that's circling through your head. And, you know, we all know that if you're experiencing

• 41:03Speaker 03

  anxiety or depression, people will say things like, "Go outside and take a walk," and that will kind of- Like, you know, jumpstart you into a new kind of pattern of thinking, perhaps. But sometimes it's really hard to get out of bed when you're experiencing a situation like that. Just turning on a song is a really low barrier to entry way to take yourself into another thought scape entirely. One that can hopefully set you on potentially some better track. Thirdly, I am a person who both has aging parents and I have teenage children. I have two children who are Gen Z and one who is Gen Alpha.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  And it turns out that sharing our musical daydreams across these generations has been one of the most fascinating and connecting experiences that I've had, both with my parents and with my children. Because we're all listening to the same sounds, right? We're having this shared sensory experience. But when we're able to really then talk about what it means to us, what we imagine, what the associations are for us and how it becomes meaningful in our mind. There's a whole new insight I can get about things that feel very personal to these people who I really care about that would be hard to talk about in more abstract terms.

• 42:28Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's pretty cool.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been it's been a real blast for for me over these past few years. You know, leveraging in a way these experiences to have some really cool conversations.

• 42:43Mike Carruthers?

  I'm kind of, I'm just curious, what happens if you looked at this? What happens when you ask people about what stories they're imagining when they listen to music? When it's music they hate, they don't like it at all, or music they've never heard before. It's like playing country music to some tribe in Africa that has never heard country music. So there's a void there. So what happens?

• 43:11Speaker 03

  This is such a great question, and I have a couple of telling examples here. One example is that when we played people in the US, examples of this Chinese music that they said they had not been familiar with before, that was on an instrument, so a Chinese instrument, that sounded kind of slide guitar dobro-y, right? That would be like the frame that people ended up putting in, or that's what we hypothesize happened, because they readily imagined stories to this music, but the stories were of a solitary cowboy, sitting out on the front stoop in a ghost town, looking over the, you know, dry desert landscape.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  So the idea there that we have about what was happening is they were really just slotting that into this kind of dobro soundscape. Conversely, when we played music that was for string quartet, that is highly atonal, okay? So it sounds really like the pitches sound quite random. People in the US can't get past the kind of psycho effect, and really experience that as a scene of somebody alone in their house, getting stalked by a murderer. When we played that for people in this village in China, where they didn't have much experience with Western media, and often had no experience with Western media, they told us a story

• 44:39Speaker 03

  that was quite similar to one another, but about something very different. They reported imagining having fun playing games outside with friends. And what we think was happening there is that they didn't need to impose this framework of tonality, what should be happening with the pitches, they were perfectly fine with what was going on in that dimension, and were tuning in instead to the fact that the notes were quite short, and jumped back and forth between high and low registers really quickly. And it's easy to kind of imagine how that could read as playful. So again, you see this opportunity to kind of get behind someone's ears, and have this

• 45:18Speaker 03

  very different sensory meaning-making experience about how a shared kind of stimulus comes to have an intuitive sense about what it's connoting.

• 45:28Mike Carruthers?

  Well, what I find so fascinating about this is, and your saxophone example that you mentioned earlier, that makes me think of a rainy day street in New York City. I always thought, I've never discussed this with anybody because I always thought I was the only person that did this. I'm the only one that associates rainy days in New York City with that kind of saxophone music. My guess is lots of people do. It's just nobody ever talks about it.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. And think about it. That's a whole constraining set of forces to how you're experiencing the world, right? How you're structuring the universe you're living in. And so, you know, from where I'm sitting, there's just so much to learn from turning our lens on these very fleeting experiences that show us a lot about actually how we've been wired to, you know, understand our world around us. And it reminds me a little of the phenomenon of earworms. So this idea that songs can get stuck in your head, which people tended to think was their own kind of weird problem, until research really turned a lens on it and started showing that these were really common experiences. In fact, the

• 46:45Speaker 03

  majority of people experience the earworms really regularly. And, oh, actually, there's a lot we can learn about human memory by studying them. I view musical daydreams very much in that vein.

• 46:57Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is really helpful and explains a lot. I think many of us, many people listening have thought, well, you know, that's just me. I, you know, I hear certain kinds of music. I think of things. I have images. That's just what I do. But everybody does it. And it's interesting to hear how similar we all are. Elizabeth Margulis has been my guest. She is a professor of music at Princeton, and the name of her book is Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Elizabeth, thank you. Thanks for explaining all this.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Thanks, Mike. I've enjoyed our conversation so much.

• 47:41Mike Carruthers?

  Why do people close their eyes when they kiss? It's not just romance, it's neuroscience. Researchers have found that the brain has a hard time fully processing touch while it's also busy taking in visual information. In studies on sensory load, people became less sensitive to touch when their brains were occupied with visual tasks. In other words, if your eyes are open during a kiss, your brain is spending precious processing power looking instead of feeling. Closing your eyes appears to help the brain tune out distracting visual information so you can focus more intensely on the sensation, emotion, and physical experience of the kiss.

• 48:26Mike Carruthers?

  There may also be another reason. At kissing distance, faces are actually too close for your eyes to focus. So what you're seeing is mostly an awkward blur. So closing your eyes while kissing isn't just romantic etiquette, it's your brain trying to get the most out of that moment. And that is something you should know. If you're feeling a bit creative, why not leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you're listening? It's a great way to support this show because other people read your review and then they decide, "Well, yeah, maybe this is a good show to listen to." So we like five-star ratings and we love well-thought-out reviews. We do read them and we appreciate you writing them.

• 49:10Mike Carruthers?

  I'm Micah Rutherford, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 49:44Speaker 04

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