In an fMRI study, unfamiliar music sparked shared imagined stories

An unfamiliar instrumental passage played through the scanner, and listeners’ minds began supplying scenes, events and meanings of their own. At Princeton University, fMRI scans showed that music activated not only the brain’s auditory regions but also higher-order networks tied to imagination and meaning—a pattern similar to what appeared when people listened to spoken stories.

The study, published in Nature Communications, asked participants to hear 10 unfamiliar musical excerpts and 10 spoken stories across two sessions. After each one, they described what they had imagined. The researchers then compared those reports with the brain activity recorded while the excerpts were playing.

The surprising part was not simply that people imagined stories. Different listeners often converged on the same one: an average of 71% matched the “consensus” story associated with each musical excerpt. When a piece of music and a spoken passage prompted the same imagined narrative, they also produced similar activity in the same regions of the brain.

That overlap reached the default mode network, which links areas involved in imagination, memory and meaning. Elizabeth Margulis, the study’s principal investigator and director of Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab, said the results point to “a very concrete meaning-making process” in music, rather than an experience confined to processing sound.

So what changes, concretely? The result offers researchers a new laboratory window onto mind-wandering: music can serve as a controlled trigger for studying how people build internal narratives. The team also points to possible future applications in depression and anxiety, where patients may become fixed on particular thought patterns. Those uses remain possibilities, not treatments; the evidence here comes from brain imaging and participants’ reports in a controlled study.