Thrilling Music Is Like Food And Sex: More Pleasure and Anticipation Equals More Dopamine

4 (1 votes) Feel and even anticipating the exciting music releases the neurotransmitter dopamine "pleasure" chemical in the brain that are associated with the material rewards such as food, drugs and sex, said researchers from Canada, who measured the dopamine response to the music and found a "cold "or" trembling "music is, even in the anticipation phase, the more dopamine released.

You can read about a study conducted by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (Neuro) at McGill University, on-line in the 9 January issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

For the study, researchers started with a group of 217 people and kept testing different measures "cold" or "trembling" caused by the same music. This group eventually gave the eight students whose anatomical "arousal" responses, such as changes in skin conductance, heart rate, respiration and temperature, are consistent in every audition, even in different environments.

8 students went on ahead to the main part of the study, where for three listening sessions, the researchers scanned their brains using a novel combination of PET (positron emission tomography) and MRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) techniques.

Participants also completed a questionnaire to assess the number of pleasure they got from the music they listened to during the sessions.

Lead researcher Valorie Salimpoor, Neuro and McGill graduate psychology program, told the press that:

"Typically, this is a big challenge for the study of dopamine activity both during the waiting time and the consumption phase of the award."

But she explained that the PET scanner captures both phases, and when you add these results to the term of the fMRI scans, you'll end up with a unique assessment of the specific contribution of each brain at different points in time. "

"Music is unique in the sense that we can measure all the awards phases in real time as it progresses from a basic neutral to waiting until the peak of pleasure all the while scanning," said Salimpoor.

She and her colleagues found a "functional dissociation, with different brain circuits involved in various phases:

"... The caudate was more active in anticipation of, and the nucleus accumbens was more actively involved in the peak experience emotional reactions to music," they write.

They also stated that these two phases are related to similar concepts in music, such as tension and resolution (as you will, for example, when you go from G7 chord back to C major).

They concluded that this study shows that the "great pleasure in response to music can lead to the release of dopamine in the striped system."

And, they added, it also shows that waiting Abstract Award "(the music is not considered material rewards, like food or sex), can release dopamine in different anatomical path to that is triggered at the peak of actually experiencing a pleasant reward.

"Our results help explain why music is such a high value in all human societies," said Salimpoor and colleagues.

Co-author Dr. Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist Neuro and Head of the laboratory, which works in Salimpoor, said:

"These results provide neurochemical evidence that intense emotional reactions to music include ancient incentive schemes in the brain."

He said that as far as they knew it was the first study to show that abstract rewards may lead to the release of dopamine.

Abstract reward primarily cognitive in nature, and this research opens the way for future work to study the intangible benefits that people find useful for complex reasons, "he explained.

"Anatomically different dopamine release in anticipation of, and experience the height of emotion and music." Valorie N Salimpoor, Mitchell Benovoy, Kevin Larcher, Alain Dagher, and Robert J Zatorre. Nature Neuroscience, published January 9, 2011. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2726

Author: Catherine Paddock, PhD