Music and states of consciousness: A narrative review of the broader significance of music to understanding absorption, mind wandering and creative thought Due to music’s extraordinary capacity to temporarily alter mental and physical states, the domain of musical experience offers a natural and accessible field of investigation for the study of states of consciousness. However, despite the continued emergence of music-related investigations into conscious experience, their research paradigms remain on the fringes of consciousness research, with the broader significance of their contributions often overlooked. In this narrative review, we aimed to address this gap by offering a twofold contribution. Firstly, we have highlighted and critically assessed key contributions of empirical research in music psychology and music neuroscience to our understanding of non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as absorption, mind wandering and creative thought, emphasizing the broader significance of exploring consciousness through music. Secondly, we have identified the unique aspects of music that offer special insight into consciousness and discussed how these aspects can shape future investigations. Overall, our review underscores the importance of integrating music into consciousness research and highlights avenues for future exploration in this interdisciplinary field.
Self-views converge during enjoyable conversations Based on current research, it is evident that the way people see themselves is shaped by their conversation partners. Historically, this literature focuses on how one individual’s expectations can shape another person’s self-views. Given the reciprocal nature of conversation, we wondered whether conversation partners’ self-views may mutually evolve. Using four-person round-robin conversation networks, we found that participants tended to have more similar self-views post-conversation than pre-conversation, an effect we term “inter-self alignment.” Further, the more two partners’ self-views aligned, the more they enjoyed their conversation and were inclined to interact again. This effect depended on both conversation partners becoming aligned. These findings suggest that the way we see ourselves is coauthored in the act of dialogue and that as shared self-views develop, the desire to continue the conversation increases.
Neural Representations of Emotions in Visual, Auditory, and Modality-Independent Regions Reflect Idiosyncratic Conceptual Knowledge Growing evidence suggests that conceptual knowledge influences emotion perception, yet the neural mechanisms underlying this effect are not fully understood. Recent studies have shown that brain representations of facial emotion categories in visual-perceptual areas are predicted by conceptual knowledge, but it remains to be seen if auditory regions are similarly affected. Moreover, it is not fully clear whether these conceptual influences operate at a modality-independent level. To address these questions, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study presenting participants with both facial and vocal emotional stimuli. This dual-modality approach allowed us to investigate effects on both modality-specific and modality-independent brain regions. Using univariate and representational similarity analyses, we found that brain representations in both visual (middle and lateral occipital cortices) and auditory (superior temporal gyrus) regions were predicted by conceptual understanding of emotions for faces and voices, respectively. Additionally, we discovered that conceptual knowledge also influenced supra-modal representations in the superior temporal sulcus. Dynamic causal modeling revealed a brain network showing both bottom-up and top-down flows, suggesting a complex interplay of modality-specific and modality-independent regions in emotional processing. These findings collectively indicate that the neural representations of emotions in both sensory-perceptual and modality-independent regions are likely shaped by each individual’s conceptual knowledge.
Predictive Representations: Building Blocks of Intelligence Adaptive behavior often requires predicting future events. The theory of reinforcement learning prescribes what kinds of predictive representations are useful and how to compute them. This review integrates these theoretical ideas with work on cognition and neuroscience. We pay special attention to the successor representation and its generalizations, which have been widely applied as both engineering tools and models of brain function. This convergence suggests that particular kinds of predictive representations may function as versatile building blocks of intelligence.
Self-association enhances early attentional selection through automatic prioritization of socially salient signals Efficiently processing self-related information is critical for cognition, yet the earliest mechanisms enabling this self-prioritization remain unclear. By combining a temporal order judgement task with computational modelling based on the Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), we show how mere, arbitrary associations with the self can fundamentally alter attentional selection of sensory information into short-term memory/awareness, by enhancing the attentional weights and processing capacity devoted to encoding socially loaded information. This self-prioritization in attentional selection occurs automatically at early perceptual stages but reduces when active social decoding is required. Importantly, the processing benefits obtained from attentional selection via self-relatedness and via physical salience were additive, suggesting that social and perceptual salience captured attention via separate mechanisms. Furthermore, intra-individual correlations revealed an ‘obligatory’ self-prioritization effect, whereby self-relatedness overpowered the contribution of perceptual salience in guiding attentional selection. Together, our findings provide evidence for the influence of self-relatedness during earlier, automatic stages of attentional section at the gateway to perception, distinct from later post-attentive processing stages.
Scene consistency enhances state representations of real-world objects Previous research has shown that the context in which objects are located significantly influences how efficiently they are categorized. However, less is known about whether scene consistency can also affect the processing of finer object features, such as the state of an object (e.g., the angle of a swiss army knife or the fill level of a bottle). Therefore across three experiments, we presented a subset of the JURICS stimulus set, where each object exists in 20 continuously varying states (e.g., from fully closed to fully open) in scenes that were either contextually consistent or inconsistent. Participants were asked to report the specific state of the object using a continuous report task. Our results showed that scene consistency enhanced the precision of state judgments, i.e. participants made significantly larger errors in reporting object states when objects were presented in inconsistent compared to consistent scenes. These findings suggest that scene context exhibits its effect already on the fine-grained perceptual processing of objects, affecting not only object categorization but the accuracy of its perceived features.
Dissociation of attentional state and behavioral outcome using local field potentials Successful behavior depends on attentional state and other factors related to decision-making, which may modulate neuronal activity differently. Here, we investigated whether attentional state and behavioral outcome (i.e., whether a target is detected or missed) are distinguishable using the power and phase of local field potential (LFP) recorded bilaterally from area V4 of two male rhesus monkeys performing a cued visual attention task. To link each trial’s outcome to pairwise measures of attention that are typically averaged across trials, we used several methods to obtain single-trial estimates of spike count correlation and phase consistency. Surprisingly, while attentional location was best discriminated using gamma and high-gamma power, behavioral outcome was best discriminated by alpha power and steady-state visually evoked potential. Power outperformed absolute phase in attentional/behavioral discriminability, although single-trial gamma phase consistency provided reasonably high attentional discriminability. Our results suggest a dissociation between the neuronal mechanisms that regulate attentional focus and behavioral outcome.
Functional networks of inhibitory neurons orchestrate synchrony in the hippocampus Inhibitory interneurons are pivotal components of cortical circuits. Beyond providing inhibition, they have been proposed to coordinate the firing of excitatory neurons within cell assemblies. While the roles of specific interneuron subtypes have been extensively studied, their influence on pyramidal cell synchrony in vivo remains elusive. Employing an all-optical approach in mice, we simultaneously recorded hippocampal interneurons and pyramidal cells and probed the network influence of individual interneurons using optogenetics. We demonstrate that CA1 interneurons form a functionally interconnected network that promotes synchrony through disinhibition during awake immobility, while preserving endogenous cell assemblies. Our network model underscores the importance of both cell assemblies and dense, unspecific interneuron connectivity in explaining our experimental findings, suggesting that interneurons may operate not only via division of labor but also through concerted activity.