Experiencing and even anticipating thrilling music releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, a “pleasure” chemical in the brain that is linked to tangible rewards like food, drugs and sex, said scientists from Canada who measured dopamine response to music and found the more “chills” or “frisson” the music elicits, even in the anticipation phase, the more dopamine is released.
You can read about the study, by researchers from The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) at McGill University, online in the 9 January issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience.
For the study, the researchers started with a group of 217 people and kept testing various measures of “chills” or “frisson” elicited by the same pieces of music. This group eventually yielded 8 listeners whose anatomical “arousal” responses, such as changes in skin conductance, heart rate, breathing, and temperature, were consistent at each listening, even in different environments.
The 8 listeners then went forward to the main part of the study, where over three music listening sessions, the researchers scanned their brains using a novel combination of PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) techniques.
The listeners also completed a questionnaire to rate the amount of pleasure they got from the music they listened to during the sessions.
Lead researcher Valorie Salimpoor, a graduate student at the The Neuro and McGill psychology program, told the press that:
“It is generally a great challenge to examine dopamine activity during both the anticipation and the consumption phase of a reward.”
But she explained that the PET scanner captures both phases, and when you add those results to the time-sensitive scans from the fMRI, you end up with “a unique assessment of the distinct contributions of each brain region at different time points”.
“Music is unique in the sense that we can measure all reward phases in real-time, as it progresses from baseline neutral to anticipation to peak pleasure all during scanning,” said Salimpoor.
Further reading: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/213412.php
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