Study: Love music? Thank a substance in your brain
Whether it’s the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people’s brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It’s active in particular circuits of the brain.
The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren’t necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.
The study volunteers chose a wide range of music – from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Debussy’s Claire de Lune.
Those are my favorite compositions.
Another similar type study would be to discover the reason why some types of tunes never die and others get old very fast. Very much like people. The key is to keep releasing the dopamine. The substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. Why do you think I am a member of the Adventure Society and the Thrillionaires Club?? Why do you think some people have scores of admirers and most others don’t?? Why do you think that after you get intimate with men they become obsessed with you and they don’t with any other women???
You figure it out.