Origin of music and embodied cognition

Mystery of MusicMusic is a poorly understood ability.Its strong power over humans, its origin and cognitive function, have been a mystery for a long time.Aristotle (1995) listed the power of music among the great unsolved problems.Darwin wrote (1871) that musical ability "must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which (man) is endowed."Nature published a series of essays on music (Editorial, 2008).The authors of these essays agreed that "none. . .has yet been able to answer the fundamental question: why does music have such power over us?" (Ball, 2008).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 InstinctAccording 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.They measure vital bodily parameters and indicate to the organism their deviations from safe ranges.Emotional neural signals connect these instinctual indications to decision-making brain-mind regions (Grossberg and Levine, 1987;Grossberg, 1988).The emotions felt are associated with these neural signals.For example, a bodily sensor-like mechanism measures sugar level in the blood and indicates when it is below a safe range.This generates emotional neural signals, which are felt as hunger and drive decision-making mechanisms to look for food.Instincts and emotions are the mechanisms of embodiment.This theory of drives and emotions has been extended to the knowledge instinct (KI) and aesthetic emotions (Perlovsky, 2001(Perlovsky, , 2006(Perlovsky, , 2007(Perlovsky, , 2014a,b;,b; Perlovsky and Kozma, 2007; Mayorga and Perlovsky, 2008;Perlovsky et al., 2011).KI measures similarities between representations and top-down signals, or more generally between bottom-up and top-down signals.KI drives the development of mental representations in correspondence with experience throughout the hierarchy.Neural circuits involved in KI are discussed in Levine and Perlovsky (2008).Satisfaction or dissatisfaction of KI is indicated by aesthetic emotions.The existence of these special emotions related to knowledge were first discussed by Kant (1790), and have been experimentally demonstrated in Perlovsky et al. (2010).Aesthetic emotions embody knowledge. Mental HierarchyKnowledge is stored in the brain's mental representations, which are organized in an approximate hierarchy from raw sensory percepts at the "bottom" to objects, to situations, to abstract thoughts,