The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to. The researchers call this the ‘ anticipatory phase’ and argue that the purpose of this activity is to help us predict the arrival of our favourite part. What is rather more significant is the finding that the dopamine neurons in the caudate- a region of the brain involved in learning stimulus-response associations, and in anticipating food and other ‘reward’ stimuli - were at their most active around 15 seconds before the participants’ favourite moments in the music. As these two regions have long been linked with the experience of pleasure, this finding isn’t particularly surprising. The first thing they discovered is that music triggers the production of dopamine - a chemical with a key role in setting people’s moods - by the neurons (nerve cells) in both the dorsal and ventral regions of the brain. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI), they were able to obtain an impressively exact and detailed portrait of music in the brain. They then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favourite songs - virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango - and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people who experience ‘chills’ to instrumental music, the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots.Ī recent paper in Neuroscience by a research team in Montreal, Canada, marks an important step in repealing the precise underpinnings of ‘the potent pleasurable stimulus’ that is music. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. When listening to our favourite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deeply. Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer considers the emotional power of music
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