Music, Art, Sleep Creativity, Sex, and Love

Music, Art, Sleep Creativity, Sex, and Love

Research is needed in certain areas to help understand consciousness.

Music, art, sleep, sex, and love are experience sources that, if properly understood in terms of neural network functionality, could greatly elucidate the understanding of consciousness.

Music As Neural Network Resonance, Stimulating the Limbic System

Humans produce speech and music with sound patterns that can be partially interpreted in terms of their format representations in a sound spectrogram. The sound patterns are detected in human hearing and processed in the audio cortex. If the sound pattern is music or speech with a significant prosodic quality, the neural networks of the audio cortex lock into (entrain) an ongoing sequence of momentary resonances, which stimulates the limbic system to generate neurotransmitters such as dopamine, thereby stimulating the nucleus accumbens and producing a sense of pleasure. Understanding the neural network mechanisms of the audio cortex and its relationship with the frontal cortex and hippocampus in re-exciting long-term memories could provide much insight for understanding how this neural network activity emerges as pleasurable feelings in consciousness.

Both listener and performer should be considered and distinguished in the study of neural network activity. A pianist or a violinist must develop and maintain the FAPS necessary for unconscious movement control during performance. A listener experiences mirror neuron activity together with the limbic system.

Link to -- Music and the Brain -- Emotion and Movement

Link to -- Music Processing Modularity

Sleep As Disassembly and Self-Organized Reassembly of Neural Networks for Creativity

Sleep is a function that can lead to human creativity.

Link to -- Hobson's AIM Diagram for Consciousness

Sex As the Most Intense Sensation Stimulating the Limbic System

Sex is such a prominent biological function that understanding its mechanisms in the brain's neural networks could provide a greatly enhanced understanding of consciousness.

Research Study -- Brain Activation during Ejaculation

Sexually Based Love As a Mutual Addiction

Sexually based love in my interpretation is a mutual addiction between two people, based initially on the basal biological mechanisms of lust, but developing into neural networks and long-term memories that are tightly bound with the limbic system, utilizing much of the neural network circuitry that mediates any other addiction, such as gambling or pornography. Two people in love can be interpreted as two brains with neural networks and limbic systems that are mutually addicted to each other. Teenage love involves highly sensual biological mechanisms stimulated by hormones. Decades later, the raging passionate emotions of young teenage love subside into the older mature love of mutually addicted companionship.

Art Stimulates the Cognitive Together with the Limbic System

The function of art is to transmit a mental image or impression from the mind of the artist to the mind of the observer. The brain functions to generate and maintain internal models of perceived reality. The internal models can be a realistic or fictive, resulting in either realistic or unrealistic belief. The mental impressions experienced by the observer can result in a limbic system interpretation that may range from pleasurable to disturbing.

Perception interacts with long-term memory resulting in a different interpretation and reaction by each observer.