← Something You Should Know
Something You Should Know
Why Humans Crave Rituals & How Music Transports Your Mind
00:49:27
Why humans need rituals, how music transports your mind, and the truth about melatonin.
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We are in this incredible renaissance of new rituals around the world. Like organ donation or adoption, divorce, cancerversaries, soberversaries. There is this desire. Let's find new ways to be together.
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Also why you almost always close your eyes when you kiss someone. And the fascinating power and science of musical daydreams. What are they?
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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.
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All this today on something you should know. You know, it's interesting. We'll fix our diet, we'll try to sleep better, maybe even exercise more. But when it comes to mental health, a lot of us just sort of, you know, think about it and then do nothing. Look, May is Mental Health Awareness month. A good reminder to take a step, not just think about it. Because if you've ever tried to find a therapist you it can be harder and more expensive than it should be. That's why I like Rula. R U L A Rula makes it easy to get help. Rula partners with over 120 insurance plans, so the average copay is about $15 a session. They connect you with licensed therapists who fit what you need. And Rula supports every aspect of your mental health journey from therapy to to medication management. No wait lists, no hassles. Appointments can be as soon as tomorrow. So instead of saying yeah, I should look into that someday, this is a really easy way to follow through. I'm such a big proponent of taking care of your mental health. This is Mental Health Awareness Month. Don't just think about your mental health, take steps to take care of it. Visit rula.comsysk to get started. That's R U L A.comSYSK you deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.
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Something you SHOULD know Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today.
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Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. You know melatonin has become one of the most popular sleep aids in America. 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 youg 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. 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. And that is something you should know. 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. 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 Fieler has traveled the world exploring these questions. He. He's the author of several bestselling books. His latest is called A Time to How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us. Hi, Bruce. Welcome back. Good to have you on something you should know again.
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B
Hi there, Mike. Nice to be with you. Thank you for inviting me.
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A
So what is a ritual? What makes something a ritual?
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B
Well, that question turned out to be quite controversial, but because there's different kinds of rituals. There's political rituals like inaugurations and coronations. There's calendric rituals like Thanksgiving or Mayday. 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. 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 so many 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 and is they make us feel at home.
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A
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?
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B
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 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. 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.
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A
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.
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B
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 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, cancerversaries, soberversaries, your first phone, on and on and on. And so I think that what's happening 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 meet 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. So what inspires me is the call that this makes to all of us to find new ways, whatever it is, that 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.
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A
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.
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B
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 1975% 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. 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, 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 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, prescripted, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, enforced ritual. It was bottom up. 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.
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A
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, is it for you or is it to show respect for somebody else or all of the above or what's the point?
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B
I think that that's a really important question. It's a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. I think it, 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 moments are, 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 sudd, 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. And then they allow us to reconstitute ourselves. So 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.
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A
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. You know, I've realized something. I don't actually like shopping for clothes. I like having better clothes. Which is why I love quints. Because this time of year I try to do that reset thing. You know, fewer things in the closet, but things I actually want to wear. And their stuff makes it so easy. Their linen pants are a great example. I wear them all the time. They're light, breathable and really comfortable. But you don't look like you gave up. You actually look put together, which is nice. And they're flow knit stuff. I didn't expect to care about this, but it is soft moisture wicking doesn't hold odor. It's one of those things where you wear it once and you go, oh, okay, now I get it. You know, we were out with some friends the other night and Quince came up in the conversation and everybody chimed in, oh, I love Quince. And certainly one reason is the price. You're getting top quality clothes at like 50 to 60% less than what you'd expect because they go straight to the factories and cut out the middleman. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to Quince.comSYSK for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. Go to Quince.com SYSK for free shipping and 365 Day Returns.
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A
We're discussing rituals and the role they play in our lives. Bruce Fieler is my guest. He is author of a book called A Time to 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.
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B
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's. 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. You know, 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. 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.
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A
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?
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My wife's favorite chapter in A Time to Gather 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 gonna 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. 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 an occasion to mark this moment because it was formerly 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 on, 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. 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.
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A
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 make my point. I remember once going to. I think it was Easter, or maybe it was a Christmas church service with a Catholic friend, and the whole service was in Latin, 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. I have no idea what's going on. And yet there was something about it that. That was, I don't know, kind of cool. I mean, it was a ritual, but in some ways it was an empty ritual for me. But I still am glad I went.
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B
And I want to say a couple things in response to that. The most important thing, and the first thing I will say is that prescripted 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 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. 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 an 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, are what I call ritual entrepreneurs. They're realizing that they have to adjust.
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A
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 want people to get from this?
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B
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 taking care of the group. And so I would say lesson number 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.
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A
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 Fieler. The name of his book is A Time to 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.
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B
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.
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A
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- [32:51]
C
Thanks so much. Great to be here.
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A
So, since you study this, explain exactly what a musical daydream is.
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C
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.
- [33:24]
A
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?
- [33:47]
C
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 the stereo when you're at a cafe 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 finding that music is a particularly potent cue for this kind of transportive memory.
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A
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.
- [34:34]
C
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 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. 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.
- [36:20]
A
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 in the context I put it in, I can't imagine would be anything close to what you do.
- [36:37]
C
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 this experiment's going on for several weeks. We're finished with data collection. I open up the files, start looking at what it is that I'm going to find. And we just found that for the same excerpt, person after person was telling us just an uncannily similar story 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 thoughtscape.
- [37:51]
A
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?
- [38:12]
C
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.
- [38:43]
A
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?
- [38:52]
C
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 can 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. 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.
- [40:12]
A
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.
- [40:51]
C
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?
- [41:07]
A
Yeah, yeah, I can't. I'm trying to remember the end, but,
- [41:10]
C
yeah, 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 do not marry each other. And in fact, the character played by Emma Stone goes on and marries someone else and ends up being 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, 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 it's just a really visceral kind of example of having a strong personal memory to music.
- [42:28]
A
But I want to understand the benefits of this. I mean, you're doing all this research, and it is interesting, and I think Everyone has had the experience of listening to music 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.
- [42:53]
C
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 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. That was latent, right? You, you had, you couldn't access it until this 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 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 thoughtscape 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. 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. 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.
- [46:22]
A
Well, that's pretty cool.
- [46:24]
C
Yeah, it's been a real blast for me over these past few years, leveraging, in a way, these experiences to have some really cool conversations.
- [46:37]
A
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?
- [47:05]
C
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 imagine 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 dry desert landscape. 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 that was quite similar to one another, but about something very different. They reported imagining having fun playing games outside with friends. 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 very different sensory meaning making experience about how a shared kind of stimulus comes to have an intuitive sense about what it's connoting.
- [49:23]
A
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.
- [49:57]
C
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. 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 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.
- [50:51]
A
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 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 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.
- [51:29]
C
Thanks, Mike. I've enjoyed our conversation so much.
- [51:35]
A
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. 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. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.
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E
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