Spontaneous Thought and the Musical Mind: The Role of Enculturation in Music-Evoked Narratives to Indian Classical Music

Abstract

Spontaneous thought is defined as internally generated, task-unrelated mental activity that plays a foundational role in processes such as imagination, emotion regulation, and memory retrieval. While music is well-established to elicit spontaneous thought, the extent to which these experiences are shaped by cultural background remains unclear. The present study investigates the role of enculturation (the acquisition of culturally specific aesthetic and structural expectations through lived experience, media exposure, education, and geography) in shaping music-evoked narrative imagination. We focus on Indian classical music (North Indian, Hindustani, and South Indian, Carnatic), a tradition defined by the rāga system: highly codified melodic frameworks culturally associated with specific times of day, emotional states, and even physical phenomena (e.g., rain or the seasons). These culturally significant associations make rāgas, and by extension Indian classical music, an ideal system for examining how shared musical meaning informs spontaneous narrative construction.Participants (N = 229), categorized as Enculturated or Non-Enculturated based on their familiarity with Indian classical music, listened to eight rāga excerpts and indicated whether they imagined a narrative in response. When applicable, they provided written descriptions, which were analyzed across several dimensions: narrative engagement (vividness, clarity, temporal alignment, and familiarity), subjective enjoyment, elaboration, and semantic content. Although narrative frequency was similar across groups, Enculturated participants demonstrated significantly higher engagement, familiarity, and enjoyment for specific rāgas (notably Mishra Bhairavi and Revati), and showed a stronger correlation between enjoyment and engagement. Narrative content was further evaluated using natural language processing techniques, including TF-IDF, sentence embeddings derived from SBERT, and unsupervised clustering. Enculturated participants produced narratives that were not only more semantically coherent but also clustered by rāga, reflecting shared associative frameworks. These patterns were confirmed using permutation-based null models. In contrast, Non-Enculturated participants displayed more diffuse and less structured narrative patterns. Together, these findings provide robust evidence that spontaneous thought in response to music is culturally bounded: shaped by aesthetic priors from lived experience rather than universally abstract processes. By extending prior work in music cognition and narrative imagination, this study also points toward culturally informed therapeutic applications, particularly in contexts where spontaneous thought is clinically disrupted (e.g., MDD, ADHD).