What is music? A unified theory of music and dreaming
This line of research is incredibly interesting to me. Thanks a lot for the work and for sharing! I subscribe to a lot of your premises and hypotheses.<p>So I thought I&#x27;d return the favor, some humble food for thought. Disclaimer: it&#x27;s all personal research[1].<p>On to the meat. Forgive the imperative tone sometimes, it&#x27;s all in good spirits and for brievety.<p>&gt; <i>The processing of feelings often includes thought processes</i><p>That&#x27;s possibly idiosyncratic imho.<p>Feeling and thought evolved, in this order, as general processing systems for the bodymind (feelings originate simply as &quot;the language of the body&quot;, neither good nor bad in nature but mostly communication of internal states; thinking is more correlated to sensory perception it seems — literally could have just been selected initially to process signals e.g. visual or auditory, then evolved from there).<p>They both now work in concert but there is no definite telling which dominates &quot;generally&quot;, it seems to differ a lot between individuals; e.g. men seem to have a stronger awareness of their internal state (&quot;thinking their emotions&quot;) whereas women tend to require strong physical states to reach awareness, and conversely report much more about &quot;feeling their thoughts&quot;, their mental state. This is just one statistical example among probably many variations of that order.<p>Stephen Covey in the famous <i>7 Habits</i> conveys this point: <i>“Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”</i> Great advice in itself, it hints at the fact that untrained people tend to respond <i>without</i> thinking, thereby promoting their emotions from &quot;guidance system&quot; to &quot;decision-making system&quot;.<p>I think that &quot;letting go&quot; and &quot;being spontaneous&quot; — what we do to dance <i>well</i>, emotionally — are positive modes (or rather balancing acts, responses) that strongly suggest a need to prefer emotions over thoughts at time. It&#x27;s certainly necessary on the way to survival (mating, hence dating, seduction; but also politics from the house to the office, etc.).<p>So I humbly suggest:<p>- everytime you framed analysis implying thought <i>after</i> or <i>in response to</i> emotions, it&#x27;s worth investigating a &quot;thoughtless&quot; direct response (note: in this context everything is a response, even in inaction we make a choice, e.g. to &quot;keep on listening&quot;).<p>- De-correlate the two poles of thought and emotion, seen independently as different types of parallel processing, different &quot;kinds&quot; of machines (different I&#x2F;O too).<p>- Consider operating modes where &quot;emotions ≥ thoughts&quot; in the final output, in full agreement with one&#x27;s thoughts, to voluntarily &quot;stop thinking&quot;.<p>&gt; <i>To fully understand how this could be possible, we need to analyze all the differences between music and dreaming.</i><p>Actually I would look into testing physiological responses first (and notably not neglect the long-term benefits, the lasting psychological qualia (or its consequences, like soothing, or energizing) over hours, days, months even (as possibly counter-evidenced by cases of severe deprivation of dreaming).<p>&gt; <i>Dreaming is Much Older than Music</i><p>I think it speaks to the evolution of brain structures indeed, it seems that interpreting &quot;music&quot; is a rather advanced feature. It&#x27;s also largely possible that other species would hear &quot;music&quot; that sounds like random gibberish, noise to us — and vice-versa. We know <i>almost for sure</i> that other species don&#x27;t recognize human music, but there&#x27;s little in the way of telling what <i>could</i> actually be music to their ears.<p>&gt; <i>Within dreams, the content and the emotions are provided as a single fixed package.</i><p>I&#x27;m not sure about that. The systems involved in making the images&#x2F;story, and those involved in their perception and the feelings thereof might be largely distinct structures (assuming the brain keeps working generally the same regardless of wake state).<p>What I mean is that in both dreams and music, to my perception, the content is provided; whatever I <i>feel</i> or <i>think</i> about it comes after as an internal response&#x2F;state; finally I respond (whether suppressed or not by the body as when dreaming). Note that this is all in parallel, new data has entered perception by the time I respond to the last input.<p>I think it strengthens your case: the two processes are even more comparable in this view.<p>A word about imagination, which as I see it always takes off in-between &quot;processing results&quot; (from inputs) and &quot;call for a response&quot; (our final output) — this even tiny moment of hesitation to <i>validate</i> action before we do, which in some cases is temporally absent from perception, especially in heightened emotional states (e.g. adrenaline has a way of blurring&#x2F;blinding perception to the limbic low-level, the pains, the fears, etc.)<p>- For these physiological reasons, music (and any emotion-inducing activity) acts as a temporary &#x27;limbic painkiller&#x27; of sorts. Sorta occupies the mind, focus, perception.<p>- Imagination is both a crude low-level &quot;feeling&quot; about &quot;what <i>could</i>&quot; (be, have been, happen, etc) and rises up to high-level full-fledged &quot;thinking&quot; powerhouse specialized in creation. Again, this feeling-thinking dichotomy. In this I think we may observe how &quot;low-level emotions&quot; are swamping dreams whereas &quot;high-level thinking&quot; of the kind we invoke to process imaginary images upon music is much more controlled, indeed &#x27;aware&#x27; of its virtuality — it&#x27;s almost as if thinking was a higher-level processing system able to differentiate between reality and fiction, which emotions at a lower-level of processing don&#x27;t seem able to!<p>&gt; <i>This difference may be directly relevant to explaining why music is human-specific – because actively thinking about long-term goals is (as far as we know) a specifically human endeavour.</i><p>I&#x27;m not entirely sure about this whole long&#x2F;short-term dichotomy in this case; I think it&#x27;s more of a consequence of the above physiological systems that we are more <i>immediately</i> concerned with feelings in dreams and more <i>laid back</i> about a non-threatening wake situation — you have to realize how dramatically different both these moments are to the brain, below any form or degree consciousness.<p>Bluntly put, when survival is at stake, we see the deepest&#x2F;oldest structures emerge back in full-force (unsurprisingly low-level layers tend to be strongest at &quot;overriding&quot; general functioning).<p>&gt; <i>Strangeness</i><p>Really interesting take! I wonder if it&#x27;s also a matter of system (low&#x2F;high level, or thinking vs feeling, or a fluke of perception that switches off in dreams or is too complex to properly work at that level.<p>I&#x27;ve long identified &quot;familiarity&quot; as one of the big determinants (in humans as in animals, it&#x27;s one of those really low-level deeply refined mechanisms, that just appears about as soon as memory is possible, even ROM from DNA that produces unaware biological structures). Things just move &quot;towards&quot; the familiar &quot;good&quot;, and &quot;away&quot; from the &quot;unfamiliar&quot; or &quot;familiarly bad&quot;.<p>Which, when you think about it, can also be expressed in terms of strangeness, the reversed polarity of familiarity.<p>Regardless, your observations on strangeness do fit my current model&#x2F;view quite well[2]. I need to thank you again for the food for thought.<p>Great read, amazing approach!<p>____<p>[1]: My &quot;goal&quot; has always been a general model of the &quot;bodymind&quot; (like &quot;spacetime&quot;, I reject the fragmented theory of duality, and include animals in the continuity). So I have a rather 10,000 ft bird&#x27;s-eye approach, more &#x27;structural&#x27; and less &#x27;specific&#x27; I guess, however such research as OP&#x27;s are pure honey to me — they help me inform all the categories I wrestle with in my research.<p>In all honesty and transparency, I&#x27;m not &quot;university-qualified&quot; in those fields — there&#x27;s too many of them anyway. But I do pride myself on 20+ years of <i>strong transdisciplinarity</i>, always trying to answer this question: <i>&quot;what makes us tick? why do we do what we do?&quot;</i><p>[2]: Briefly, the model is graph-inspired with geometric elements, and I have so far identified ~7 nodes or &quot;powers&quot; as I call them (of which thought, emotion and perception are 3). The &quot;unconscious&quot; is yet another (sits below everything else as the proto-mind, the earliest processing system), and what I call &quot;will&quot; or &quot;wisdom&quot; is about the highest-level, most developed (it roughly corresponds to the prefrontal cortex, biologically, and &quot;philosophy&quot; in our ontology). This is where long-term awareness happens, e.g. our ability to delay gratification — a clear case of thoughts totally overriding emotions.<p>I&#x27;ve observed a sort of &quot;tension&quot; (I really mean both the common term, and the math concept of tensors) between the unconscious and my node of &quot;will&#x2F;wisdom&quot; — it seems that both act as &quot;impulse drivers&quot;, sources of volition and willpower (which is notably in finite quantity for a day and tends to replenish after sleep&#x2F;dreaming, it also seems about the same for everyone but with significant differences which apparently are rather hard to change, train, de-train).<p>I&#x27;ll end it there unless you want more, but in general terms it seems that &#x27;wisdom&#x27; is the seat of our &#x27;informed and valued knowledge&#x27;, that is an integration of emotions and thoughts in a way that &quot;is right and feels right&quot;, it&#x27;s pretty much &quot;system 3: aggregator&quot; if you call the other two system 1 and system 2 like Daniel Kahneman.<p>That might be an angle worth looking at to frame&#x2F;model&#x2F;explore some of your questions.<p>Edits: typos and clarifications