Music, Perception, and Cognition - The Artist as a Channel for Popular Anergia

By Jackson Cionek

Music as a Living Cognitive Phenomenon

Music is not just sound — it’s a conscious activation of tension and resolution that shapes the brain like a micro-self. It creates and dissolves attentional states, evokes brief bioelectrical emotions, and mobilizes deeper, stabilized feelings — those that structure our Tensional Selves.

Music is organized perception processed in real-time cognition, with the power to restore both metabolic and social harmony.

Perception and Cognition: An Embodied Experience

Perception is an individual reality. It arises from the interaction between the body (through its 12 senses, including the Human Quorum Sensing – HQS we propose), the environment, and the available affective-sensory memories at a given moment.

Cognition is the processing of that perception — guided by attention, expectations, and context — and ultimately by the Tensional Selves that govern our embodied presence.

Collective Anergia and REM Sleep

Throughout the day, we accumulate unresolved tensions — emotional experiences that were not metabolized, expressed, or released. These build up as anergia: blocked energy, unable to become movement, voice, crying, or dancing.

The brain requires mechanisms to release this charge. One of the most powerful is REM sleep, particularly in its two phases:

• Tonic REM: reorganizes motor and proprioceptive patterns; refines bodily awareness and the fluidity of sensorimotor consciousness.
  
  

• Phasic REM: triggers symbolic sensory-emotional bursts, simulating scenarios and emotions that could not be processed during wakefulness. Here, the brain can dissolve, re-enact, or reconfigure our Tensional Selves.
  
  

This REM cycle acts as an inner artist, releasing accumulated anergia through dream-like simulations.

The Artist as a Social Metabolism Facilitator

Yet not everyone fully accesses this REM-based resolution.
That’s where the artist — and especially the musician — becomes essential.

Music offers a symbolic, embodied path for tension release.
By organizing sound into rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic structures, it activates affective and bodily memories in the listener.
It invites us to simulate and embody alternate selves, creating internal space for anergia to flow and resolve.

Just like in phasic REM, the body responds symbolically: we breathe differently, we feel, we move, we cry.
When an artist gives voice to popular pain, repressed fears, denied love, or collective indignation, they are shaping and moving the people’s anergia.

Music as a “Micro-Self” Activated

Every musical piece can be understood as a micro Tensional Self — a cognitive-emotional arc with a beginning, middle, and end.
As listeners, we follow that arc as if it were our own. This creates a powerful neuroaffective discharge, a mental and emotional reset.

This idea aligns with recent scientific findings:

• EEG Microstates (Michel & Koenig, 2018): music activates specific neural microstates linked to attention and emotion processing.
  
  

• Default Mode Network and Musical Imagination (Koelsch, 2014): music modulates networks related to self-image and internal narrative flow.
  
  

• REM Sleep and Emotional Processing (van der Helm & Walker, 2011): REM sleep — and symbolic equivalents like music — help “digest” emotions and restore affective stability.
  
  

Human Quorum Sensing and Art as Collective Regulation

If our concept of Human Quorum Sensing (HQS) suggests that belonging and identity are modulated by bioaffectivity and social synchrony, then the artist — by channeling the group’s tensions — becomes a regulator of collective homeostasis.

A concert, a samba circle, a gospel choir, a symphony — they all reconnect us as if we were dreaming together.

Conclusion: Music as a Flow of Healing

Art — and especially music — is not luxury or entertainment.
It is a vital function. A means of metabolizing the day’s anergia, just as phasic REM does through the dream process.

The artist, by activating their own micro-tensional-self through music, offers the public a way to do the same.

In an era of social media, where anergia builds up in cycles of outrage every 72 hours, it may be urgent to reconnect with what regulates us: the body, the rhythm, the sense of belonging.

Suggested References:

• Koelsch, S. (2014). Brain correlates of music-evoked emotions. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
  
  

• van der Helm, E., & Walker, M. P. (2011). Sleep and emotional memory processing. Psychological Bulletin.
  
  

• Michel, C. M., & Koenig, T. (2018). EEG microstates as a tool for studying the temporal dynamics of whole-brain neuronal networks. NeuroImage.
  
  

• Altenmüller, E., & Schlaug, G. (2015). Music, brain, and health: An interdisciplinary approach. Progress in Brain Research.
  
  

• Jackson Cionek (2024). Yãy hã mĩy and the Tensional Selves: Musical Cognition as Bioaffective Belonging Release. Blog NeuroInsight.