This finding suggested to her that when people listen to unfamiliar music, their brains process the sounds through memory circuits, searching for recognizable patterns to help them make predictions about where the song is heading. But, she also found increased interaction between the nucleus accumbens and higher, cortical structures of the brain involved in pattern recognition, musical memory, and emotional processing. When analyzing the brain scans of the participants, she found that when they enjoyed a new song enough to buy it, dopamine was again released in the nucleus accumbens. But this time she had participants listen to unfamiliar songs, and she gave them some money, instructing them to spend it on any music they liked. This pairing of anticipation and pleasure is a potent combination, one that suggests we are biologically-driven to listen to music we like.īut what happens in our brains when we like something we haven’t heard before? To find out, Salimpoor again hooked up people to fMRI machines. Presumably, the anticipatory pleasure comes from familiarity with the song-you have a memory of the song you enjoyed in the past embedded in your brain, and you anticipate the high points that are coming. There’s another part of the brain that seeps dopamine, specifically just before those peak emotional moments in a song: the caudate nucleus, which is involved in the anticipation of pleasure. “It’s also released with drugs that are very powerful and addictive, like cocaine or amphetamines.” “That’s a big deal, because dopamine is released with biological rewards, like eating and sex, for example,” says Salimpoor. During peak emotional moments in the songs identified by the listeners, dopamine was released in the nucleus accumbens, a structure deep within the older part of our human brain. How powerful? In one of her studies, she and her colleagues hooked up participants to an fMRI machine and recorded their brain activity as they listened to a favorite piece of music. “A single sound tone is not really pleasurable in itself but if these sounds are organized over time in some sort of arrangement, it’s amazingly powerful.” How music makes the brain happy “Music affects deep emotional centers in the brain, “ says Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University who studies the brain on music. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |