Thursday Rabbit Hole - 01: The Psychology Behind the Playlist

Referencing: Monday Mixtape - 01: Well, That Escalated Quickly

What did my mind do? Did I make a playlist, or did my brain make a story?

Earlier this week, I shared ten songs I genuinely love. There was no grand psychological plan behind the choices.

But let’s take a peek at their titles and see what we see:

Wow > Ride > 505 > Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked > Come As You Are > Someday > I Want to Hold Your Hand > Never There > Let’s Get Lost > Shattered Soul.

My innocent little playlist appears to be having an existential relationship crisis.

Why can a collection of songs start to feel like a story? And listening to them evokes similar feelings?

Let’s get curious and dive down the research rabbit hole.

It turns out there are some fascinating possibilities when we look at the research.

Music can be a powerful cue for autobiographical memory. Research on music-evoked autobiographical memories suggests that familiar music can bring personal memories to mind remarkably quickly and vividly. Music doesn’t simply remind us of a song; we associate it with particular people, places, periods of our lives, and versions of ourselves.

Music may also help us narrate our everyday lives. A fascinating 2026 study described something researchers called “cinematic musical episodes.” Participants used music to situate themselves in a particular time and place, imagine narratives about their lives, regulate their emotions, explore their identities, and sometimes experience themselves as the main character in a movie.

Suddenly, putting on 505 as we are driving to work feels considerably more dramatic.

Then there’s nostalgia. Music-evoked nostalgia appears to be strongly associated with autobiographical significance, familiarity, and, interestingly, a mixture of positive and negative emotions. A song can therefore carry much more than “I like this.” It may carry an entire period of our lives with it. For me, Nirvana always brings me back to high school, and I am sure others have different memories that come to mind.

And our minds are storytellers. Research on autobiographical memory and narrative identity suggests that we don’t experience our memories simply as disconnected events. We organize experiences into larger narratives that help create continuity and meaning around who we are.

Which brings me back to my playlist.

The interesting moment most likely wasn’t when I chose the songs for the playlist; it likely happened afterward, when my mind looked at ten unrelated choices and started to look for connections and some meaning.

So perhaps a playlist exists somewhere between music, memory, emotion, identity, and our very human tendency to make a story out of it all.

So let’s test our theory with a little unscientific experiment:

If you listened to the ten songs in the Monday Mixtape 01: Well, That Escalated Quickly without knowing anything about why I chose them, what story would you hear?

And just like that, we have another pattern emerging: my Monday playlist is leading to a Thursday research rabbit hole.

I’m surprisingly ok with this, and I look forward to seeing you next week.

A little of the research behind this rabbit hole:

Kaiser, A. P., & Berntsen, D. (2023). The cognitive characteristics of music-evoked autobiographical memories: Evidence from a systematic review of clinical investigations. WIREs Cognitive Science, 14(3), e1627.

Kourilehto, L., Saarikallio, S., Peltola, H. -R., & Westinen, E. (2026). “It is the Soundtrack for my Life” - Cinematic Construction of Self-Identity Through Music Listening. Music &

Science, 9.

Barret, F. S., Grimm, K. J., Robins, R. W., Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., & Janata, P. (2010). Music-evoked nostalgia: Affect, memory, and personality. Emotion, 10(3), 390-403.

Fivush, R., Habermas, T., Waters, T. E. A., & Zaman, W. (2011). The making of autobiographical memory: Intersections of culture, narratives, and identity. International Journal of Psychology, 46(5), 321-345.