This line of research is incredibly interesting to me. Thanks a lot for the work and for sharing! I subscribe to a lot of your premises and hypotheses.

So I thought I'd return the favor, some humble food for thought. Disclaimer: it's all personal research[1].

On to the meat. Forgive the imperative tone sometimes, it's all in good spirits and for brievety.

> The processing of feelings often includes thought processes

That's possibly idiosyncratic imho.

Feeling and thought evolved, in this order, as general processing systems for the bodymind (feelings originate simply as "the language of the body", neither good nor bad in nature but mostly communication of internal states; thinking is more correlated to sensory perception it seems — literally could have just been selected initially to process signals e.g. visual or auditory, then evolved from there).

They both now work in concert but there is no definite telling which dominates "generally", it seems to differ a lot between individuals; e.g. men seem to have a stronger awareness of their internal state ("thinking their emotions") whereas women tend to require strong physical states to reach awareness, and conversely report much more about "feeling their thoughts", their mental state. This is just one statistical example among probably many variations of that order.

Stephen Covey in the famous 7 Habits conveys this point: “Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Great advice in itself, it hints at the fact that untrained people tend to respond without thinking, thereby promoting their emotions from "guidance system" to "decision-making system".

I think that "letting go" and "being spontaneous" — what we do to dance well, emotionally — are positive modes (or rather balancing acts, responses) that strongly suggest a need to prefer emotions over thoughts at time. It's certainly necessary on the way to survival (mating, hence dating, seduction; but also politics from the house to the office, etc.).

So I humbly suggest:

- everytime you framed analysis implying thought after or in response to emotions, it's worth investigating a "thoughtless" direct response (note: in this context everything is a response, even in inaction we make a choice, e.g. to "keep on listening").

- De-correlate the two poles of thought and emotion, seen independently as different types of parallel processing, different "kinds" of machines (different I/O too).

- Consider operating modes where "emotions ≥ thoughts" in the final output, in full agreement with one's thoughts, to voluntarily "stop thinking".

> To fully understand how this could be possible, we need to analyze all the differences between music and dreaming.

Actually I would look into testing physiological responses first (and notably not neglect the long-term benefits, the lasting psychological qualia (or its consequences, like soothing, or energizing) over hours, days, months even (as possibly counter-evidenced by cases of severe deprivation of dreaming).

> Dreaming is Much Older than Music

I think it speaks to the evolution of brain structures indeed, it seems that interpreting "music" is a rather advanced feature. It's also largely possible that other species would hear "music" that sounds like random gibberish, noise to us — and vice-versa. We know almost for sure that other species don't recognize human music, but there's little in the way of telling what could actually be music to their ears.

> Within dreams, the content and the emotions are provided as a single fixed package.

I'm not sure about that. The systems involved in making the images/story, and those involved in their perception and the feelings thereof might be largely distinct structures (assuming the brain keeps working generally the same regardless of wake state).

What I mean is that in both dreams and music, to my perception, the content is provided; whatever I feel or think about it comes after as an internal response/state; finally I respond (whether suppressed or not by the body as when dreaming). Note that this is all in parallel, new data has entered perception by the time I respond to the last input.

I think it strengthens your case: the two processes are even more comparable in this view.

A word about imagination, which as I see it always takes off in-between "processing results" (from inputs) and "call for a response" (our final output) — this even tiny moment of hesitation to validate action before we do, which in some cases is temporally absent from perception, especially in heightened emotional states (e.g. adrenaline has a way of blurring/blinding perception to the limbic low-level, the pains, the fears, etc.)

- For these physiological reasons, music (and any emotion-inducing activity) acts as a temporary 'limbic painkiller' of sorts. Sorta occupies the mind, focus, perception.

- Imagination is both a crude low-level "feeling" about "what could" (be, have been, happen, etc) and rises up to high-level full-fledged "thinking" powerhouse specialized in creation. Again, this feeling-thinking dichotomy. In this I think we may observe how "low-level emotions" are swamping dreams whereas "high-level thinking" of the kind we invoke to process imaginary images upon music is much more controlled, indeed 'aware' of its virtuality — it's almost as if thinking was a higher-level processing system able to differentiate between reality and fiction, which emotions at a lower-level of processing don't seem able to!

> This difference may be directly relevant to explaining why music is human-specific – because actively thinking about long-term goals is (as far as we know) a specifically human endeavour.

I'm not entirely sure about this whole long/short-term dichotomy in this case; I think it's more of a consequence of the above physiological systems that we are more immediately concerned with feelings in dreams and more laid back about a non-threatening wake situation — you have to realize how dramatically different both these moments are to the brain, below any form or degree consciousness.

Bluntly put, when survival is at stake, we see the deepest/oldest structures emerge back in full-force (unsurprisingly low-level layers tend to be strongest at "overriding" general functioning).

> Strangeness

Really interesting take! I wonder if it's also a matter of system (low/high level, or thinking vs feeling, or a fluke of perception that switches off in dreams or is too complex to properly work at that level.

I've long identified "familiarity" as one of the big determinants (in humans as in animals, it's one of those really low-level deeply refined mechanisms, that just appears about as soon as memory is possible, even ROM from DNA that produces unaware biological structures). Things just move "towards" the familiar "good", and "away" from the "unfamiliar" or "familiarly bad".

Which, when you think about it, can also be expressed in terms of strangeness, the reversed polarity of familiarity.

Regardless, your observations on strangeness do fit my current model/view quite well[2]. I need to thank you again for the food for thought.

Great read, amazing approach!

____

[1]: My "goal" has always been a general model of the "bodymind" (like "spacetime", I reject the fragmented theory of duality, and include animals in the continuity). So I have a rather 10,000 ft bird's-eye approach, more 'structural' and less 'specific' I guess, however such research as OP's are pure honey to me — they help me inform all the categories I wrestle with in my research.

In all honesty and transparency, I'm not "university-qualified" in those fields — there's too many of them anyway. But I do pride myself on 20+ years of strong transdisciplinarity, always trying to answer this question: "what makes us tick? why do we do what we do?"

[2]: Briefly, the model is graph-inspired with geometric elements, and I have so far identified ~7 nodes or "powers" as I call them (of which thought, emotion and perception are 3). The "unconscious" is yet another (sits below everything else as the proto-mind, the earliest processing system), and what I call "will" or "wisdom" is about the highest-level, most developed (it roughly corresponds to the prefrontal cortex, biologically, and "philosophy" in our ontology). This is where long-term awareness happens, e.g. our ability to delay gratification — a clear case of thoughts totally overriding emotions.

I've observed a sort of "tension" (I really mean both the common term, and the math concept of tensors) between the unconscious and my node of "will/wisdom" — it seems that both act as "impulse drivers", sources of volition and willpower (which is notably in finite quantity for a day and tends to replenish after sleep/dreaming, it also seems about the same for everyone but with significant differences which apparently are rather hard to change, train, de-train).

I'll end it there unless you want more, but in general terms it seems that 'wisdom' is the seat of our 'informed and valued knowledge', that is an integration of emotions and thoughts in a way that "is right and feels right", it's pretty much "system 3: aggregator" if you call the other two system 1 and system 2 like Daniel Kahneman.

That might be an angle worth looking at to frame/model/explore some of your questions.

Edits: typos and clarifications