Music

Abstract This chapter shows how my neural network models of learning and consciousness can be specialized to describe a neural network model that proposes explanations of how human brains consciously attend, perceive, learn, and perform musical lyrics and melodies with variable rhythms and beats. The model accomplishes this by applying and specializing brain design principles and mechanisms that evolved earlier than human musical capabilities, and that have been used to explain and predict many other kinds of psychological and neurobiological data. This fact raises questions about whether music is “special” or is the outcome of an opportunistic evolutionary combination of capabilities that evolved to achieve more basic survival skills