feeling and meaning

how does feeling become meaning?

Jordan Ali

Apr 24, 2025

“The more we feel, the more it means.”

A collective act

We—together—feel something

Strength is in numbers, in repetitions—

the more we feel together, the more it means

All of this—what follows—grew from a sentence I have drafted in a Beethoven essay, where I say:

when we start to hear smaller sub-phrases in the music, that's a sign that our mind is “learning how the music goes,”
which means that we are understanding how to live the sub-articulations in the sound—
which really means that we are learning where the beginning, middle, and ends are—
which is ultimately how we create meaning.

That was my thesis, but I wasn't sure about it. The pause led me to wonder: how do we create meaning in our body?

And now, I know that “learning how the music goes,” by repeated listening, is not only deeply pleasurable from a neuroscience point of view, it is also how our brains build meaning through cycles of expectation, repair, and reward.

Your favorite music often means something because it creates, and is about, tension and release. It’s about our feeling-understanding of: what are the points of tension, what are the points of transformation, and what are the points of resolution. This three-part process (tension→transformation→resolution) is really what the body/mind coheres and perceives as meaning.

… One of the benefits of listening to classical music is that it is complex, especially that 26-bar excerpt.

So in essence, the more you listen to it, the more emotional it gets. The more you hear it, the more it has to offer you…

From a neuroscience POV, do all stories have a beginning, middle, and end?

Our brain is wired to naturally organize information into sequences with cause and effect. The default mode network, which activates during daydreaming and reflection, is attuned to narrative arcs. These arcs track a shift from stability to instability (beginning to middle) followed by a movement toward resolution, transformation, or collapse (middle to end). This pattern, from open to close, rise and fall, echoes the way neurons fire and learn. In a very real way, stories mirror the way our neurons ooze neurotransmitters in sync with one another. We are physically wired to make sense of things through tension and resolution.

A better and more neurologically accurate way to think of stories is to imagine them as breath. Inhale and exhale. Tension and release. Our brain does not require patterns or stories to have beginnings, middles, and endings in order for them to cohere and hold meaning. It’s possible, for example, to follow fragmented or nonlinear stories as long as there is some throughline via logic or emotion. The shape of embodied meaning, with its rise and fall, looks less like a straight line and much more like a musical phrase.

What is tension and resolution?

Our brain is composed of many interacting systems, and is constantly trying to predict what comes next with everything in every moment—in sound, language, movement, emotions. It’s theorized that even the passage of time—from one moment to the next—emerges from our predictive bio-machinery.

Intuitively, we know that time is shaped by our wiring because we choose to enter trance and flow states all the time. It makes sense then that we impulsively seek out inputs like edibles, drinkables, and music to alter our sense of time.

Systems like the dopaminergic system, the default mode network, and the prefrontal cortex work together to model the world. When our model is correct and our predictions true, we feel satisfaction. When predictions are violated in meaningful ways, we feel drama, surprise, interest.

How does tension arise? Tension arises when a prediction is blocked or contradicted. An unresolved chord, or a moral conflict, activates areas like the anterior cingulate cortex, the amygdala, and the striatum. This feels like, “wait, this isn’t right.” You get aroused, alert, maybe feel discomfort. This is tension.

As tension builds, our brain actively looks for coherence, a coherent pattern that would resolve the uncertainty. It scans the chaos to find the order within, and if it succeeds it means that it would be able to successfully predict once again.

Our brains are constantly predicting our inner and outer worlds. So when tension builds—when the self or the world is not as we predicted—we learn by seeking out a new pattern so that it can successfully predict again. In other words, we learn, but not in a named way, in a wired and felt way.

Pattern recognition

How does our brain know which pattern coheres, or “closes the loop?” Does our brain know which pattern is a resolution beforehand, and how could it? The answer is stunning. It remembers. Our brain has a vast model of the world built through accumulated experience. It’s as if the brain taps into an encoded collective ‘memory of the self’ to solve a broken pattern.

Rules are patterns that have succeeded across time, and those patterns have been encoded by both individuals and cultures as potential solutions or expectations. One example of this “collective” memory in western music is the rules of part writing, which help students solve problems in harmony, like how to harmonize a given melody.1

The brain does not seek out just any old pattern though, it seeks out coherence based on its prior learning. Patterns feel “right” when they resonate with what has already been wired through experience. It’s beautiful, how it all works. But how is coherence felt? (Cohere is a verb, meaning: to stick together, hold together, or be united.) How do we “know” what coheres? We’ve arrived now at the edge of what science can tell us. The important thing is that we know: we hear the end of the song and we relax, the story ends and we sit in silence. Learning is not only logical. Learning—the closure of the pattern—is bodily, emotional. Tensions and resolutions are felt, not just known.

So what comes first, feelings or the pattern recognition? Do we find and create meaning and then feel an emotion, or do we first feel and create meaning after? The answer is neither. Or both. It works more like a never ending process … an always beginning process.

Something happens to us—a touch, a memory—and the body reacts first, immediately. Signals flow from body to brain. But our brain is not passive, it actively creates predictions. It’s like the brain sets the stage for the body as the actor. Brain makes laws, body makes poetry.

Consider how emotions refer to both sensations and to the words we use to describe them. Emotions are a combination of sensation and prediction, of feeling and logic. They are more like processes than fixed concepts. The process of emotion has no beginning. Our pantheon of emotions emerge from both bottom-up and top-down processes. It's the brain and body in constant dialogue, changing each other with each step.

Is identifying a pattern a form of resolution? Yes. Pattern recognition is the moment where tension collapses into resolution, into understanding. When there is resolution—a completion of a pattern, or moral clarity—the uncertainty decreases, dopamine is released, and the pattern is now encoded into memory. The pattern is learned. The world-model is updated and expanded.

In summary, when a pattern is recognized and is emotionally charged, the pattern gets encoded into memory through coordination between the hippocampus, amygdala, and cortex. This is how a new concept is born.

Stories—meaningful narratives—live in our brain, an organ shaped by billions of years of evolution. The questions we ask about meaning hold a kind of weight because they are tethered to everything that has shaped us. We become like fish studying the water.

Does our brain prefer linearity?

Our brain does not inherently prefer linearity, but it does prefer coherence, causality, and resolution. When nothing connects, our brain loses interest. That is disintegration and discomfort, which is not the same as nonlinearity.

Our brains don’t need things like logic or plot points to go from A to B to C to D, but we need to perceive relationships, process change, and feel closure for the meaning cycle to activate. We can handle nonlinear narratives just fine, in fact brains like puzzles. They’re stimulated by them. It gets pleasure from reconstructing stories from pieces. So that the brain can follow, there has to be an internal logic or an emotional arc.

Think now of music. Music is often nonlinear, entirely—it loops and bends and pops and repeats here and there at random. But we follow it because the piece

creates tension (stimulation),
transformation (new awareness of what was unknown),
and release (clear prediction, pattern recognition)

inside of us.

How do our brains create meaning?

Broadly speaking, our brain creates meaning through synchronized cycles of expectation, break, and repair. We expect one thing, something different happens, then something reconnects back: through recognition. This cycle is called concept formation, or what a musician would call resolution. We are wired to seek structure in chaos: patterns, motifs, causes and effects. This neuronal wiring and activity of ours is the stage and groundwork for meaning.

This next point is very important. Things become meaningful when they matter to us emotionally and viscerally. That’s what emotions are, a tagging system.

The amygdala, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex all engage and work together to flag something emotional as important. The more emotionally charged an experience, the more we embed it as meaning. The more we feel, the more it means.

Pattern breaks

Traumatic experiences, which Bessel van der Kolk partially defines as an emotionally overwhelming event, leave a long-lasting significance in the survivor.2 He writes:

“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”

A child is wired, like us, to survive the world through making sense of it. To them, a fog of fear will stay with them for long, shaping them, because they, like us, tag highly emotional events as significant. Trauma is tragic. The brain doesn’t update its model, it shatters. It doesn’t organize around coherence, it shuts down and locks into fear. It’s a great loss when the normal learning process adapts to danger instead of safety. One lives out many days undoing. But the possibility of undoing is key.

In the absence of trauma, our brain does something different during the pattern break, something firm and quiet. It listens, … fails, rewires, and then tries again. Our brain is always adapting, and we have a capacity to change in miraculous ways. Meaning is what emerges when the pattern break doesn’t break you, but transforms you.

“It’s random.”

I like thinking about this meaning-making as a two-part process, similar to the narrative arcs tracked by the default mode network. An open-close pattern.

Part one is moving from expectation to a break in the pattern. It’s like our brain is playing an odd version of where's waldo, constantly scanning the chaos of our inner and outer worlds, not just to find what stands out but to find and predict the underlying order. When it finds the striped shirt break in the pattern, it finds what it has been waiting for. This is the open phase.

Part two is the close phase. After our brain sees the pattern break, it responds by learning. It expands its model of the world to include the break in the pattern so that it can predict it next time. What we call learning is our brain readjusting its model to include what once surprised it.

How do neurons “learn” from a pattern break? Dopamine. We are rewarded when we predict successfully. Our brains desire to be wired in the state where it predicts the world well. The wild and beautiful reality is that when a pattern break is noticed, the neurons simply try to rewire themselves differently so that they can be able to predict the new pattern and be less surprised next time. And that rewiring process? It’s random. At least at first—our brain tries, predicts again, and guides itself to greater and greater accuracy. Maybe random is too strong a word, probabilistic might be better. We have mechanisms, feedback loops, that guide the rewiring process to be efficient. The general story is: in neuroscience and generating the feeling of life, we learn through trial and error. Trial and error—tripping towards truth—is how we close and complete the cycle of meaning creation.

Think for a minute how beautiful you are. Your brain does not learn in a straight line because such a line does not exist. Instead, you flail around with grace moving toward coherence. The symphony of chemistry in your head inches slowly towards more and more truth about the world. The drive behind the story of how you evolved to survive has been woven into you. It’s actually not beautiful. It’s divine. Out of chaos, randomness itself, out of the raw substrate of the universe, you evolved to carve out meaning. It’s not a metaphor, it’s what you are.

Neurologically, does emotion precede meaning?

The relationship between meaning and emotion is circular and interrelated, not one way. So, yes and no.

Our brain often processes emotion first, so neurologically speaking, yes. Emotion, though, is not a primary sensation. We feel our heart rate quicken, our stomachs drop, our eyes widen, and then we interpret those signals into emotion: excitement, anxiety, wonder.

Sensation → emotion

Meaning then emerges from our interpretation of that emotion, which has the power to reinforce or reshape the way the emotion feels.

Sensation → emotion → meaning → Sensation → …

These signals happen milliseconds apart and billions each time so it all feels like one experience, and, because the meaning cycle is a loop and not a line, it is one experience.

Art and science

For a moment, let’s connect what we just learned about meaning-making to a deep concept in music theory that we introduced way back in our harmony course: the key change, or modulation.3

We proved that a true harmonic modulation has three parts: an opening cadence, a neutral field, and a closing cadence. We proved it with logic, with excerpts from musical literature, and most importantly, we proved it to ourselves by listening to examples that didn’t have that structure and comparing it to ones that did.4 We found that the neutral field was necessary to ‘destroy’ the tonality of the beginning to allow for a new one to emerge at the end. Otherwise, we still hear traces of that original tonality, and the modulation without three parts performs with less clarity and emotive power.

The three part structure of a modulation—the opening cadence, a ‘destroying’ neutral field, and a final cadence in a new key—matches how our neurons work together so that the world can mean something. The three part structure for how we create meaning—expectation, break, and repair—is what we find in modulations. The neurons collectively shift keys whenever they update their connections with one another at the end of the learning / meaning-making process.

I structured my whole harmony course to center ‘performing powerful modulations’ as the exercise that would unlock the deepest understanding of harmony. I saw those lessons as the turning point of the course. I knew there was something divine about that three-part structure. I couldn’t fully articulate it at the time, I just knew deep down that it changed everything for me, and that it was so helpful that it seemed to speak to a fundamental truth about the universe. The science of how our bodies create meaning helped confirm for me that musical structure is much more than what it seems on paper.

We see it has taken a while for western science to catch up with what has already been known by animists and shamans and priests and artists for a long time. Consider the musician, in particular, dedicating their lives to creating “artful” sound. What does artful mean? Sound that sounds good, pleasurable to us? Yes sure, but more than that, right? Artful sound is sound that is meaningful. It’s no surprise that neuroscience would confirm the work of centuries of musicians and listeners who have built on each other’s work and life experience. The proof is the power of the work of art itself. Sure they didn’t speak in the scientific language, but they didn’t need to. Science is not the only way to truth. Good science and good art pursue the same thing.

Other Sources of Meaning

Earlier I said that broadly speaking, our brains create meaning through an expectation-break-repair cycle. In what specific instances is that not totally true?

First, not all meaning comes from a disruption and recognition of a pattern. For example, in minimalist music, like that of Arvo Pärt, or even in chanting prayer, the repetition alone becomes the source of meaning.

Think about salience and phenomenological epoché—if you’re in a concert and someone coughs, you don’t interpret that as a part of the music, you ignore it and move on. When you’re at a cafe on the phone and there’s chatter all around, you don’t interpret that as part of the conversation, you process it but don’t make meaning around it. What I find interesting is the pattern interruptions themselves have to be meaningful for it to carry that positive feeling of surprise and interest. So very often meaning is made through a loop, but not always.

To connect back to the question of how our brain creates meaning, I also learned that there is another way: by compressing time into a structure. This is what a story does, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. A musical cadence does this as well, but perhaps in the other direction, by compressing structure onto time. This process takes place in the default mode network, where we imagine and empathize, the same network that lights up when we listen to music without words.

What is: meaning?

It’s a process.

We feel something emotional, which signals—

something is significant.

From that, we find a pattern.

The emotion, very often, is the tension.

And the pattern recognition — felt-cognition — is the release of that tension.

This is the process of meaning and meaning-making.

It is our way of organizing experience into coherent patterns that help us understand and respond to the world.

Neurologically, meaning arises from emotion, memory, and forecasting. Meaning happens when we sense a connection between cause and effect, when we interpret events in relation to ourselves, and when we experience coherence and resonance. Meaning is the felt recognition of pattern, connection, and transformation.

I believe there are multiple definitions of meaning, from neuroscience to music to philosophy. The one that ultimately matters is the one working away furiously inside your head.

Share Letters from a Composer

thanks for reading, you beautiful creatures.

This essay draws on ideas from neuroscience, philosophy, and music theory to reflect on meaning-making. I’m a composer, not a scientist—and my goal is to share the insights I’ve been exploring into an artistic context that speaks to our human condition. This space is my open invitation.

Letters from a Composer