Why do we enjoy music

The auditory brain is exquisitely sensitive to such regularities and can learn statistical relationships quickly and efficiently, even early in life, via exposure to exemplars of the system in question melodies, rhythms, words, and sentences. This is how babies learn about sound patterns in their environments. To test the neural substrates of this ability, researchers have devised procedures presenting a set of sounds that follows standard, expected rules e.

In this situation, violations of expectancy yield a characteristic brain response that originates in auditory areas and frontal regions. Such predictions are based not only on what has just been experienced in the moment, but also on a knowledge of sound patterns in general drawn from our entire listening history.

The brain mechanisms sketched very roughly above provide the substrates for a number of perceptual and cognitive skills without which, I argue, music would not be possible. If we could not extract pitch information, or hold it in memory, or understand pitch relationships, or make predictions, we could not have what we call music.

But none of this explains why we like music so much. For insights into that question, we need to consider a totally different set of brain structures: the reward system. Scientists have accumulated a great deal of evidence, from both animal models and human studies, to identify the system that signals the presence of a stimulus that has value for the organism. An obvious example would be a hungry rat that is trained to press a lever in response to a cue such as a light coming on to receive food.

Early studies showed that in this situation certain neurons situated deep in the subcortex, in a structure called the striatum, responded with bursts of dopamine release when the food was delivered. But it soon became apparent that these responses were doing much more than merely signaling the presence of food, because after a time, these neurons stopped responding if the amount of food was constant.

That is, when the food was expected the neural responses decreased; but if the amount suddenly became larger, a vigorous dopamine response would return; and if less or no food was delivered, the response would actually be inhibited below baseline level. The reward system has been shown to be responsive to a wide range of complex stimuli in both humans and animals. Human neuroimaging studies consistently show activity in the striatum and other components of the reward system when people are shown images of food, or allowed to win money in gambling, or by playing video games, or are shown erotic stimuli.

Food and sex are, of course, biologically necessary for survival of the individual and the species, respectively ; and money may be thought of as having value based on the fact that one may exchange it for other desired items. Imaging studies have also shown reward-system activity for various drugs, including cocaine and amphetamines. So what does music have to do with rats pressing levers or people taking drugs? When our group first started to research music-induced pleasure, we did not know whether the same reward system that reacts to biologically relevant stimuli would also be engaged by an entirely abstract stimulus such as music.

After all, music is not necessary for survival, nor is it a medium of exchange like money, nor a chemical substance like a drug that can trigger direct neuronal responses. Our team set out to explore this question using brain imaging techniques that would allow us to measure activity in the striatum during the experience of high pleasure from music. But we immediately ran into a methodological problem: how to measure a subjective response, such as pleasure, in a rigorous, objective, scientifically viable manner?

The study of something as complex and potentially uncontrolled as musical emotion represented a particular hurdle. The advantage of this approach was that chills are accompanied by physiological changes increased heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, and so forth , from which we could derive an objective index of the timing and intensity of maximal pleasure.

To implement this idea, we asked each participating individual to select their own favorite music, guaranteed to elicit maximal pleasure. Thus armed, we were able to demonstrate in a series of studies that both dorsal and ventral striatum does indeed respond to moments of peak pleasure induced by music 15 and, using a neurochemically specific radioligand a radioactive biochemical substance that binds to a relevant molecule , that dopamine release occurred in the striatum during these moments.

These studies transformed our understanding of the neurobiology of musical pleasure but left unanswered precisely how or why the reward system is thus engaged. A clue to this question was our observation that there were two phases to the dopamine response: an anticipatory phase, occurring a few seconds prior to peak pleasure in one sub-portion of the striatum, and a second response in a different sub-region at the actual point of pleasure.

Interestingly, music theorists have posited something similar for many years: that emotional arousal and pleasure in music arise from creating tension and then leading the listener to expect its resolution, which resolution is sometimes delayed or manipulated to increase the expectation even further.

Using the chills response proved very useful; but one could ask whether the engagement of the reward system is limited to this experience; since not everyone gets chills, and since music can be very pleasurable even without any chills, it seemed important to test musical pleasure without any chills being involved. To do so we used a paradigm adapted from neuroeconomics, in which people listen to music excerpts and decide how much money they would be willing to spend to buy a recording of it.

The monetary amount is then a proxy for value, and indirectly, for pleasure. With this approach we also found that the ventral striatum showed increased activity as value increased. But a second clue emerged from this study because we also found that as value increased, and the response in the striatum increased, the higher was its coupling measured in terms of correlated brain activity to the auditory cortex and its associated network: the more listeners liked a given musical piece indexed by their willingness to spend more money , the greater the cross-talk between striatum and auditory system.

If the account of musical pleasure presented in the preceding paragraphs is roughly correct, it leads to some testable predictions. First, we reasoned that if musical pleasure arises from interactions between auditory networks and the reward system, then such interactions should be disrupted in persons who are unable to experience musical pleasure.

When we scanned their brains, we discovered that their reward system responded normally to a gambling game, but not to music; and the coupling between auditory and reward systems was essentially absent during music listening. One might say that musical anhedonia represents a chicken and egg problem: perhaps it is the lack of musical pleasure that leads to decreased connectivity between auditory and reward systems, and not vice versa.

To exclude such a possibility, it is critical to test a second prediction arising from our model: if activity in the reward system really underpins musical pleasure, then we should be able to modulate that pleasure by manipulating activity within that system in the normal brain. Previous work had shown it possible to excite or inhibit the reward system, by changing dopamine activity in the striatum with a noninvasive brain stimulation technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation.

I am very pleased to see that music neuroscience has shifted over the past decades from a fringe area to a solid research domain, with labs in many countries making important contributions and substantial progress reported in respected journals.

What not long ago seemed like an intractable problem—how music can result in strong, effective and pleasurable responses—is now a topic that we understand well enough to have significant insights into and testable hypotheses about. It is an exciting time to be working in this domain; we look forward to future developments which, based on the science discussed in this piece, we hope will include applications to clinical, educational, and even artistic domains.

Are those who perform before the public—hundreds, thousands, even millions of spectators at a time—at heightened risk of mental illness? The Brain Prize went to four individuals whose independent research led to useful treatments for a disorder affecting a billion people.

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It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. The rest is random noise. These explanations may describe why we feel joy from music, but don't explain the whole other range of emotions music can produce. When we hear a piece of music, its rhythm latches onto us in a process called entrainment. If the music is fast-paced, our heartbeats and breathing patterns will accelerate to match the beat.

That arousal may then be interpreted by our brains as excitement. Research has found that the more pleasant-sounding the music, the greater the level of entrainment.

Another hypothesis is that music latches onto the regions of the brain attuned to speech — which convey all of our emotions. It's essential to understand if those around us are happy, sad, angry, or scared. Much of that information is contained in the tone of a person's speech. Higher-pitched voices sound happier. More warbled voices are scared. Music may then be an exaggerated version of speech.

Just as higher-pitched and speedier voices connote excitement, so do higher-pitched and speedier selections of music. And because we tend to mirror the emotions we hear in others, if the music is mimicking happy speech, then the listener will become happy too. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The scientific mystery of why humans love music. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. We like music because it makes us feel good. Why does it make us feel good?

Using magnetic resonance imaging they showed that people listening to pleasurable music had activated brain regions called the limbic and paralimbic areas, which are connected to euphoric reward responses, like those we experience from sex, good food and addictive drugs. Those rewards come from a gush of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. As DJ Lee Haslam told us, music is the drug. But why? Some drugs subvert that survival instinct by stimulating dopamine release on false pretences.

But why would a sequence of sounds with no obvious survival value do the same thing? The truth is no one knows. However, we now have many clues to why music provokes intense emotions. The current favourite theory among scientists who study the cognition of music — how we process it mentally — dates back to , when the philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer suggested that emotion in music is all about what we expect, and whether or not we get it.

This, Meyer argued, is what music does too.