* Alessandro D’Ausilio, Giacomo Novembre, Luciano Fadiga, and Peter E. Keller, ‘What Can Music Tell Us About Social Interaction?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), forthcoming (available online at the time of writing)
* Valorie N. Salimpoor, David H. Zald, Robert J. Zatorre, Alain Dagher, and Anthony Randal McIntosh, ‘Predictions and the Brain: How Musical Sounds Become Rewarding’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 86-91.

Both these essays describe qualities in the experience of music that might map on to the experience of literature. D’Ausilio et al. note, however, that music is an ‘ideal domain’ for considering an aspect of cognition because ‘it offers a promising solution for balancing the trade-off between ecological validity and experimental control when testing cognitive and brain functions’. With more variables, arguably, in drama or reading novels, or at least different ones, it may yet be difficult to translate between the two.
      Nevertheless it is suggestive that they see musical ensembles as environments in which they might discover a great deal about social cognition and social interaction. This ‘microcosm’ involves cooperation and communication of various kinds, conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit. True enough, I think; but I miss – as usual, and understandably – an allowance that one string quartet might have its own special knowledge and ideas about social cognition, different from another quartet’s. Likewise I think that a play is another microcosm in which social cognition operates tangibly if not so measurably, and that plays too are the fruits of knowledge about how minds work when they interact. It should be possible to tap into that knowledge, and this is the focus of some of my current work.

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Salimpoor et al. gather recent experimental results that offer insights into musical pleasure. This results, they argue, from interactions between ‘the sensory, cognitive, and emotional systems with reinforcement circuits’; or, more technically, ‘an intricate interplay between the dopaminergic system and cortical regions that contain previously acquired sound templates, track temporal and hierarchical structure, integrate emotions with reward value, detect internal states, assign reward value to stimuli, and make value-based decisions about reward-related stimuli’.
      The point is, we have evolved to reward ourselves chemically for the exercise of our ability to predict, whether fulfilled or not (ideally, not too far either way), on the basis of remembered patterns. Individual musical tastes, and the different musical tastes of groups, arise because we have our own distinct experiences of sounds, and these then give us different predictions. This is quite a familiar idea in relation to poetry, I think, and Reuven Tsur’s work on ‘cognitive poetics’ has already defined the attraction of rhyme and metre in terms of expectation, surprise, and the like. Nevertheless the new neuroscientific depth and specificity with which they tackle the topic seem promising.