Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities.

Shared neural representations of imagined narratives are evoked by music and speech across listeners, with distinct patterns in auditory, language, and default mode regions.

• Why it matters: Understanding how the brain constructs and shares subjective experiences from different sensory inputs is crucial for insights into human cognition and communication, especially during free, imaginative listening.
• What they did: Twenty participants listened to music excerpts in an fMRI scanner while imagining stories, then recounted their imaginings; stimulus-specific and cross-condition neural patterns were analyzed.
• The result: Findings reveal modality-general brain patterns specific to each excerpt, enabling shared meaning-making across sensory modalities and advancing knowledge of neural basis for imagination and communication.