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By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter, Ap Science Writer Sun
Jan 9, 1:23 pm ET
NEW YORK Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the
same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a
chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.
The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling
musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain
cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned
people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.
While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it
also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It's active in particular
circuits of the brain.
The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across
cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal
write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to
produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to
study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.
The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who
were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some
favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how
the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.
Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also
experiencing dopamine's effects, Zatorre said.
PET scans showed the participants' brains pumped out more dopamine in a region
called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when
hearing other pieces. Functional MRI scans showed where and when those releases
happened.
Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to
a thrilling moment, and a different part when that musical highlight finally
arrived.
Zatorre said that makes sense: The area linked to anticipation connects with
parts of the brain involved with making predictions and responding to the
environment, while the area reacting to the peak moment itself is linked to the
brain's limbic system, which is involved in emotion.
The study volunteers chose a wide range of music from classical and jazz to
punk, tango and even bagpipes. The most popular were Barber's Adagio for
Strings, the second movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Debussy's Claire
de Lune.
Since they already knew the musical pieces they listened to, it wasn't possible
to tell whether the anticipation reaction came from memory or the natural feel
people develop for how music unfolds, Zatorre said. That question is under
study, too.
Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, an expert on music and the brain at Harvard Medical
School, called the study "remarkable" for the combination of techniques it
used.
While experts had indirect indications that music taps into the dopamine
system, he said, the new work "really nails it."
Music isn't the only cultural experience that affects the brain's reward
circuitry. Other researchers recently showed a link when people studied
artwork.