Abstract
Recent embodied approaches in cognitive sciences emphasize the constitutive roles of bodies and environment in driving cognitive processes. Cognition is thus seen as a distributed system based on the continuous interaction of bodies, brains, and environment. These categories, moreover, do not relate only causally, through a sequential input–output network of computations; rather, they are dynamically enfolded in each other, being mutually implemented by the concrete patterns of actions adopted by the cognitive system. However, while this claim has been widely discussed across various disciplines, its relevance and potential beneficial applications for music therapy remain largely unexplored. With this in mind, we provide here an overview of the embodied approaches to cognition, discussing their main tenets through the lenses of music therapy. In doing so, we question established methodological and theoretical paradigms and identify possible novel strategies for intervention. In particular, we refer to the music-based rehabilitative protocols adopted for Parkinson’s disease patients. Indeed, in this context, it has recently been observed that music therapy not only affects movement-related skills but that it also contributes to stabilizing physiological functions and improving socio-affective behaviors. We argue that these phenomena involve previously unconsidered aspects of cognition and (motor) behavior, which are rooted in the action-perception cycle characterizing the whole living system.
Highlights
Over the last three millennia, across different times, places, and cultures, music making, and music listening have been often associated with medicine [1], meditation [2], and well-being [3], serving a variety of functions deeply intermingled with everyday-life and social activities [4,5,6,7,8,9]
Other findings have confirmed the benefits of music-supported therapy in motor rehabilitation: first, studies with stroke patients revealed significant behavioral improvements in a variety of tasks related to fine motor skills [35, 36], accompanied by impressive reorganization of cortical sensorimotor networks [37, 38]; second, research with Parkinson’s patients has shown that entrainment with a rhythmically rich auditory feedback may alleviate Parkinsonian gait by “increasing the excitability of spinal motor neurons via the reticulospinal pathway, thereby reducing the amount of time required for the muscles to respond to a given motor command” [McIntosh et al [39], p. 25; see Arias and Cudeiro [40]]
Before we focus on how specific therapeutic settings may integrate existing methodological and theoretical models with insights from the embodied perspectives, it will be necessary to consider three basic principles associated with embodied cognition and analyze their role in neuroscience [86,87,88] and music cognition [89,90,91,92,93,94]
Summary
Over the last three millennia, across different times, places, and cultures, music making, and music listening have been often associated with medicine [1], meditation [2], and well-being [3], serving a variety of functions deeply intermingled with everyday-life and social activities [4,5,6,7,8,9]. We add that these findings reflect more generally the ecological situatedness of the whole organism: listening to music involves an active, skillful, sensorimotor, exercise, which is intrinsically determined by the sensorimotor expertise (in terms of motor vocabulary of musical actions, for example) of the musical animal – i.e., its personal capacity to co-constitute (and act in) its niche, through the establishment of a repertoire of meaningful relationships by which it maintains its autonomous identity or a ‘point of view’ [131,132,133,134] This resonates closely with a main principle of the ‘enactive approach,’ namely, the idea that perception and action are radically entwined extraneurally in non-linear terms – and that this forms the basis for our being-in-the world [59]. In the Section “A Network of Non-linear Interactions,” we will consider the challenge posited by the embodied approaches more in detail, discussing how they may help us reconsider the ways in which we look at brain science
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