[dr_dshiv]

One thing that shocked me was that no one ever tried to connect "cognitive dissonance", one of the most successful social psychology theories of all time, to actual dissonance in neural oscillations.

Consonance results in greater periodicity, meaning that the action potentials are more likely to line up, whereas dissonance has less periodicity, so action potentials don't line up. It feels better (there is pleasure) when the action potentials align because of hebbian reinforcement (synchronous firing). This assumes that reinforcement would be pleasurable, but pleasure is the main reinforcer at a cognitive level.