Music could be a Glial Illusion
An illusion is when a stimulus is presented to a person and that stimulus causes the person to falsely perceive something that is not there.
All known illusions are neuronal illusions, which are “neuronal” in the sense that it is neurons doing the perceiving and generating the false perceptions.
Glial cells are brain cells that are not neurons. Glial cells exist to support, maintain and regulate neurons.
Neurons are the primary processors of information in the brain. But they are not the only processors of information in the brain.
Glial cells that regulate neural activity necessarily have to observe the neural activity that they are regulating, that is, they have to perceive the state of neural activity of the neurons that they regulate so that they can then take action to alter the activity of those neurons in some way.
It follows that it is possible for glial cells to have false perceptions of neural activity. The result would be a form of illusion, but it wouldn’t be a neuronal illusion. It would be a glial illusion, because it would be the glial cells that were false perceiving something that wasn’t there (or falsely not perceiving something that was there).
What would such a glial illusion look like?
What would a glial illusion sound like?
I propose the hypothesis that music is a glial illusion.
That is, music is a contrived stimulus which causes thereby certain patterns of neural activity, and those contrived patterns of neural activity are incorrectly perceived and therefore incorrectly regulated by glial cells.
I develop this hypothesis in more technical detail here.
Philip, I want to better understand the Glial Illusion Hypothesis. I have questions that likely stem from my own ignorance, and I'd love some clarification:
1. If glial estimation of speech tempo is important for speech processing, why are we able to understand speech which is repetitive and at a fixed rhythm (e.g. rapping or singing)? In the case of both, the speech has a musical element (so if the Glial Illusion Hypothesis is true, speech tempo is underestimated), yet we are able to understand the speech.
2. If the glial illusion is related to the short-term decay rate of neurons, why is long-term repetition musical/emotional (such as repeated choruses, motifs, etc. that can happen over minutes)?