Our brains have a music pleasure zone.
Science told us a while ago that the music we love makes our brain fill up with the happy chemical dopamine. Now they think they’ve located the exact pleasure point.
Valorie Salimpoor and her team found out by scanning people’s brains while they listened to new tunes. Participants were then asked to rate the songs according to how much they’d pay for them.
Bigger money purchases paralleled stronger responses in the nucleus accumbens, a central brain structure involved in reward processing.
The area is where expectations are created and decisions are made on how well they were met.
Another part of the brain, the superior temporal gyrus, helps inform those decisions by supplying a background history on other stuff we like.
Neuroscientist Sophie Scott feels the results over-simplify the experience of listening to music. She agrees we interpret rewards but adds that we enjoy it for many different reasons.
Nostalgia is likely among them, as in studies connecting music and memory, the songs didn’t even have to be heard to bring about vivid recall. Their power can be so strong, the mere mention of a title or lyric can reel us back in time.
