Music is all around us. Whether you’re listening to one of Mozart’s classic concertos or to William Hung’s rendition of “She Bangs”, music has a tremendous ability to heighten our emotions. When it comes to pleasure, a team of researchers led by Dr. Robert Zatorre at McGill University has learned that listening to music causes the release of dopamine, one of the brain’s “feel good” chemicals, from key areas involved in reward and learning.
While scientists already knew that these brain areas were activated in response to music, this study is the first to show that dopamine is involved in how we process musical information. To account for differences in musical taste, researchers asked participants to bring in their own pleasurable music. (Samples are available on Dr. Zatorre's website, and a list of the participants’ selections can be found in Table S1 of another study by this group.) Using brain imaging, lead author Dr. Valorie Salimpoor was able to observe peaks in dopamine release at the same time that participants reported experiencing intense pleasure. To get a better idea of when and where this dopamine was being released, she and her team used a second imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. What they found, she says, was unexpected, but extremely interesting.
They noticed that “before people experience their peak pleasure to music, during an anticipation and build-up period, they’re also releasing dopamine, but in an entirely different region.” When participants were in the heights of musical rapture, dopamine release was most intense in the nucleus accumbens, an area that is highly connected to brain regions that process emotion. However, prior to this climax, dopamine release occurred mostly in the caudate, which is connected to areas involved in learning, expectation, and complex thinking. Because participants knew that their favorite parts of the music were coming up, their brains anticipated this reward by releasing dopamine.
Interestingly, a similar phenomenon occurs after repeated exposure to cocaine, a drug that also acts on the dopamine system. Once an animal has learned to associate certain stimuli with cocaine, it experiences two peaks in dopamine release: the first in anticipation of the drug and the second once it gets its fix. Scientists think that this anticipatory dopamine may serve to focus our attention on rewards, while the “high” we later experience may then motivate us to seek out these rewards again and again.
What the study suggests is that the reason music has such a powerful hold on us – why we spend exorbitant amounts of money on iPods and concert tickets – is that, as Dr. Salimpoor explains, music “works on the brain’s most powerful reinforcement and addiction circuit.” This is the first time that scientists have shown that dopamine is released in response to aesthetic stimuli, and Dr. Salimpoor is now working on deciphering how our brains determine if a novel piece of music is pleasurable or not.
Given the importance of music across cultures, this study sheds new light on why an appreciation for music has been conserved in humans despite the fact that it lacks an obvious evolutionary role. Music allows us to experience intense pleasure (or pain). It can transport us through time and space, letting us relive the past or imagine the future, if only for a moment. And that, as Andy Dufresne would say, is the beauty of music.
To find out more about this study, please visit Nature Neuroscience. If you are interested in learning more about the way we process music and its relation to language, listen to RadioLab's program Musical Language.
Image courtesy of Valorie Salimpoor and Peter Finnie.
You can also read this blog at Basic Research.
