Abstract

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 28 April 2015Sec. Cognition Volume 6 - 2015 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00538

Highlights

  • In this article I advocate a hypothesis that music has a specific cognitive function to embody abstract thoughts. This embodiment proceeds through musical emotions, special types of emotions that we may experience when listening to music and that connect abstract thoughts and mental representations to instinctual drives

  • According to a theory of drives and emotions developed by Grossberg and Levine (1987), instinctual drives are neural mechanisms similar to internal sensors in the mind-body

  • Emotional neural signals connect these instinctual indications to decision-making brain-mind regions (Grossberg and Levine, 1987; Grossberg, 1988)

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Summary

Mystery of Music

Its strong power over humans, its origin and cognitive function, have been a mystery for a long time. Nature published a series of essays on music (Editorial, 2008). The authors of these essays agreed that “none. In this article I advocate a hypothesis that music has a specific cognitive function to embody abstract thoughts. This embodiment proceeds through musical emotions, special types of emotions that we may experience when listening to music and that connect abstract thoughts and mental representations to instinctual drives. The embodiment of abstract thoughts through music is a unique contribution of this article.

Aesthetic Emotions and the Knowledge Instinct
Mental Hierarchy
Cognitive Dissonance and Emergence of Music
Experimental Confirmations
Musical Emotions
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