In a new paper appearing Aug. 18 in Nature Communications, Princeton University researchers show how music produces distinct patterns in the regions of the brain associated with imagination and meaning, similar to those prompted by spoken narratives. 

The new study, “Music Evokes Shared Neural Representations of Imagined Narratives Across Sensory Modalities,” used fMRI to scan people’s brains while they listened to 10 of the same unfamiliar pieces of instrumental music and 10 of the same spoken stories across two different sessions. After each excerpt of music or speech, they described what they had imagined while listening.

The fMRI scans showed that imaginative and meaning-making networks were similarly activated whether prompted by music or speech, and that varied listeners reported shared associations to the same unfamiliar musical excerpts. The research could open a window into what happens in the brain during spontaneous thought as the mind wanders, said Elizabeth Margulis, Princeton music professor and director of the University’s Music Cognition Lab and a principal investigator on the work. The research may in the future also suggest clinical applications in treating cases of depression or anxiety in which patients become fixated on a particular thought pattern. 

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