If you like music, it not only affects the pleasure center, but also stimulates the human brain.
Everyone has their own musical preferences: someone prefers classical music, someone hard rock, someone likes folk tunes. The effects of music on the brain have been studied for years. It is known that listening to your favorite songs causes a person to develop the hormone dopamine, that is, it causes the same reaction as delicious food, sex, and a feeling of comfort. Dopamine is naturally produced in large quantities during what we believe to be positive experiences. How does the brain determine what we like and what we don't?
Researchers led by Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Institute of Neurology conducted the following experiment. Nineteen volunteers aged 18 to 37 years (10 women, 9 men), who informed about their musical tastes in advance, were invited to listen to and evaluate 60 music tracks. An important condition was that the subjects listened to these works for the first time. The participants of the experiment had to evaluate the tracks they liked on the basis of an auction, paying for them from their own funds, a certain amount - 0.99, 1.29 or 2 dollars, in order to receive a disc with the selected musical compositions at the end of the experiment. During the entire experiment, each participant was connected to a functional MRI machine so that the experimenters could see how the brain responds to a particular piece of music. And although the tracks were only 30 seconds long, this was enough for the brain to determine whether he liked the music or not. In response to the music we liked, several zones were activated in the brain, but the nucleus accumbens turned out to be the most sensitive - the area that is activated when something meets our expectations. It is included in the "pleasure center" of the brain and is active during drug and alcohol intoxication and during sexual arousal. It is included in the "pleasure center" of the brain and is active during drug and alcohol intoxication and during sexual arousal. It is included in the "pleasure center" of the brain and is active during drug and alcohol intoxication and during sexual arousal.
This effect is familiar to everyone, because when choosing a book or film, we usually quickly assess whether we like it or not, literally a couple of pages or a few minutes of screen time. Our brain is able to predict sensations based on the available data: if the thermometer reads -10, then it's cold outside. It is the same with abstract aesthetic expectations. However, such predictions are often based on previous experience, and therefore a rock lover is likely to get bored with folk tunes. But in the event that the melody heard for the first time justifies expectations, dopamine is produced, which brings a feeling of pleasure.
“The amazing thing is that a person anticipates and gets excited about something completely abstract - about the sound that he needs to hear. Each person's nucleus accumbens has an individual shape, which is why it works in a special way. Also, it is worth noting that due to the constant interactions of the parts of the brain, we have our own emotional associations with each melody,”commented the results of the experiment published in the journal Science, Dr. Valori Salimpur, one of the authors of the study.
The nucleus accumbens is connected to other areas of the brain, and in the case of sounds, the auditory cortex is also involved. And the more we like the sounds that we hear, the stronger this interaction, the more new neural connections are formed, which, as you know, form the basis of our cognitive abilities. But in order to predict which particular melody each specific person will prefer, it is necessary to know his musical tastes, for which the temporal lobe is responsible. Scientists intend to investigate the connection between it and the nucleus accumbens in the near future.
“This is very interesting, since any melody consists of separate sounds, each of which individually has no value and does not bring pleasure. But when we hear a combination of these sounds, that is, music, the parts of our brain responsible for pattern recognition, prediction and emotional perception begin to interact with each other, and we get aesthetic pleasure,”commented Robert Zattore.
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By analyzing brain activity, scientists try to find out what people are thinking, understand their train of thought, motives, and ultimately predict their behavior.
Yulia Smirnova