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Other Comments:
In this article Perlovsky synthesizes a lot of material and presents interesting and controversial ideas. They unfortunately exist in the persistent climate of the considerable uncertainty about some fundamental concepts that Perlovsky employs, like “instinct,” “emotion,” “need”. It is hard to write about the musical emotions when there is no clear definition of emotions in general and understanding of the role of emotions in the key psychological processes is not clear at all.
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Competing interests:
no
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Invited by the author to review this article? :
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Have you previously published on this or a similar topic?:
No
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References:
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Experience and credentials in the specific area of science:
I've published on the role of emotions in formation of an attitude, desire, attention, and will.
- How to cite: Ovsich A J.review[Review of the article 'Music. Cognitive Function, Origin, And Evolution Of Musical Emotions ' by Perlovsky L].WebmedCentral 2011;2(12):WMCRW001231
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Other Comments:
This article proposes an interesting theory combining the essential elements of human conscience experience: language, emotions, and music. The literature overview seems exhaustive and thorough and the conclusions are appealing. Incidentally, at the time I was reading this article, the interview with Gabrielle Giffords came out and it was extremely interesting to hear how important music was for restoring the speech of the congresswoman.
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Competing interests:
No
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Invited by the author to review this article? :
No -
Have you previously published on this or a similar topic?:
No
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References:
None -
Experience and credentials in the specific area of science:
I was involved in computational neuroscience and cognitive modeling research for 5 years.
- How to cite: Ilin R .Music is essential for cognitive development[Review of the article 'Music. Cognitive Function, Origin, And Evolution Of Musical Emotions ' by Perlovsky L].WebmedCentral 2011;2(11):WMCRW001152
Music in this context is an ability to create and share infinite variations of emotions. During the evolution, human language – as an ability to split the world into concept and share them – was extracted from animal-style ‘signals’, ‘messages’ that combines conceptual meaning, emotions, and, sometimes an action. A language enhances our ability to differentiate between perceptions, situations, scenarios, and objects – providing means to assign such elaborate description to each that farther differentiations allow reuse these descriptions.
Evolving language and ability to deal with concepts almost eliminated from ‘messages’ their emotional component. This component evolved, in parallel with the language, into music. The hypothesis is based on the opposition of synthesis and differentiation – as culture-dependant action. Music increases our ability for synthesis undermined by ability – intention – to differentiate provided by human language.
This is an exciting hypothesis that is worth to now even if it is not true.
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AI, Computer Linguistics