Music activates brain region associated with reward

Scientists know that music can give intense pleasure by delivering chemical rewards in the brain that are equal to the joy of good food or even sex, but now they think they may have identified the part of the brain where this pleasure starts.

Researchers scanned the brains of subjects while they listened to new
songs and asked how much they would spend on buying the tracks. They
found that the most popular songs – those which people were prepared to
pay more for – were also the ones that elicited the strongest response
in the nucleus accumbens, a structure in the centre of the brain that is
involved in reward processing.

“This area is important because it’s involved in forming expectations
and these are expectations that could be rewarding,” said Valorie
Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “What makes music so
emotionally powerful is the creation of expectation. Activity in the
nucleus accumbens normally would indicate that expectations are being
met or surpassed.”

In the experiment, which is published in Science,
she and her colleagues scanned the brains of 20 people who used an
iTunes-like interface to listen to 30-second clips of songs they had
never heard before but were in a genre they generally liked. “Instead of
just asking them if they liked the music or not, we gave them a chance
to buy the music because that gives us a real understanding of what they
really like and want,” she said. “Immediately after they hear each
clip, they make a decision. They could spend zero dollars, 99c, $1.29 or
$2.”

The brain scans showed a direct relationship between how strong a
response someone had in their nucleus accumbens to a song and how much
they were willing to pay for it. This part of the brain was not acting
alone, however. Salimpoor also found that it was taking in information
from the superior temporal gyrus.

 

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