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2011-01-19 08:39:04
By Matthew Lasar | Last updated about 18 hours ago
An "outburst of the soul," the composer Frederick Delius called music. The
sounds associated with the form produce "a kind of pleasure which human nature
cannot do without," observed Confucius. It is the art "which is most nigh to
tears and memory," noted the writer Oscar Wilde.
It turns out that these guys were more on target than we thought. Our
experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in
our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill
University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with
MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of
their forebrains "at peak emotional arousal during music listening."
Not only that, but the scientists noticed that various parts of the striatum
responded to the dopamine rush differently. The caudate was more involved
during the expectation of some really nice musical excerpt, and the nucleus
accumbens took the lead during "the experience of peak emotional responses to
music."
In other words, just the anticipation our favorite passage stimulates the
production of dopamine. "Our results help to explain why music is of such high
value across all human societies," the writers conclude.
Chills and thrills
To learn more about the music/brain/stimulation process, the McGill researchers
followed subjects through the 'chills' or 'musical frisson' response moment.
You may have thought that chills were just a subjective concept, but that isn't
the case. They involve a "clear and discrete pattern of autonomic nervous
system (ANS) arousal," the experimenters say, which facilitate "objective
verification through psychophysiological measurements."
Bottom line: the chills moment "can be used to objectively index pleasure." So
these scientists rounded up a cohort of people who had a proven record of
getting the "verifiable chills" when listening to their favorite songs.
It took a while to find these folks. 217 people responded to an advertisement
looking for chill-susceptible music lovers. Each candidate provided ten pieces
of instrumental music that set them off in some way. The genres included tango,
techno, punk, rock, electronica, jazz, folk, and classical. They then filled
out a questionnaire designed to make sure their chills were authentic, and went
through a mental illness screening session.
Degrees of pleasure
The process produced a cohort of 10 subjects for the actual experiment, who
were scanned over two sessions. The participants listened to music that they
experienced as pleasurable or to which they felt neutral. They also kept track
of their chills themselves, including the "number of chills, intensity of
chills and degree of pleasure experienced from each excerpt."
Nature neuroscience
Meanwhile these frisson seekers were MRI scanned during the listening
experience, and images that correlated with chill laden moments were examined.
"We found that hemodynamic activity in the regions showing dopamine release was
not constant throughout the [musical] excerpt, but was restricted to moments
before and during chills and, critically, was anatomically distinct," the
researchers note.
The McGill group says that this experiment is "the first direct evidence that
the intense pleasure experienced when listening to music is associated with
dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system, including both dorsal and
ventral striatum."
Thus dopamine "is pivotal for establishing and maintaining behavior," the
researchers conclude:
If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings
indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued. These
results further speak to why music can be effectively used in rituals,
marketing or film to manipulate hedonic states. Our findings provide
neurochemical evidence that intense emotional responses to music involve
ancient reward circuitry and serve as a starting point for more detailed
investigations of the biological substrates that underlie abstract forms of
pleasure.
It also may explain why, as Oscar Wilde suggested, we experience bursts of
pleasant recollection while listening to the music that we enjoy. As studies of
nicotine use show, the cigarette induced release of dopamine stimulates the
remembrance of things past.
Nature Neuroscience, 2010. DOI
Hair splitting time....
I don't like the use of the word "intoxicating" in this sense, because it
technically means the ingestion of a foreign (or TOXIC) substance to give one a
feeling of euphoria. Music is a non-physical way to get your body to release
dopamine.
Similarly I don't sex would be considered "intoxication" either.
To further and clarify some more on your point:
1. The comparison to chemicals is misleading. There are some chemicals which
are simply the brain's normal signals for stuff like "I like this", "this is
fun", or basically, "ok, this is worth concentrating on, please continue doing
it."
Some drugs mimic the effect of such normal brain signals, by binding to the
same receptors. E.g., THC binds to the same receptors as the canabinoids in the
brain, so it creates the same euphoria, without it being actually a normal
signal released by the brain. (Whereas nicotine merely inhibits the production
of MAO-B, an enzime which neutralizes those canabinoids, so it makes you higher
by prolonging the effect of the natural ones.)
So basically it's a signal as normal as, dunno, the interrupts in a computer.
You can probably find a reason to say it's wrong to simulate interrupts that
never happened as part of the normal operation (e.g., wiring a front switch to
the NMI trace on the mobo), but railing against a situation where they happened
as intended (as this or the "OMG, games produce dopamine" hysteria) is fucking
stupid.
2. Dopamine is _not_ a reward signal, so it doesn't even produce such an
euphoria.
Dopamine is a motivation signal. Remember when I said that some signals
basically say, "ok, this is worth concentrating on, please continue doing it"?
That's what dopamine does.
Just about anything that is interesting, captivating or fun by itself is
producing dopamine. It's just the brain's way of signalling, "heeyy, I like
this! please continue this or stay in the current situation, as apropriate."
Even though dopamine does fire up when an unexpected reward happens (as you'd
expect), and is a part of the reward and reinforcement functions, it is not
itself a reward signal. It doesn't even seem to play any role in perceiving
pleasure.
3. A lot of bullshit around dopamine revolves around its use by the brain in
such stuff as sex, or that some stimulants like cocaine also increase dopamine,
or that very high levels are associated with manias and psychosis. You just
need to drop a mention of one or more of those, and everyone is already ready
to lap up "OMG, addiction" bullshit.
In reality that's not very surprising. That sex would also fire up a signal
that says "don't stop" when that's a reproduction (hence, natural selection)
advantage, is actually as expected as it gets. If the animal were likely to
just stop in the middle of sex and go "you know, this is actually quite boring,
I'll go pounce on something instead", you'd soon have an evolutionary dead end.
(Cue "you've met my ex?" wisecracks;) That it would fire up in conjunction with
artificial reward signals, when its normal function _is_ to signal "ok, keep
doing whatever gave you the reward", is again rather mundane, and rather
uninteresting for its use the rest of the time. And that an abnormal level of
it would lead to abnormal effects, again, is actually kind of the normal state
for any hormone in the body.
4. But at the end of the day, the fact still remains that it's a signal
involved in desire/drive/motivation, and in acknowledging reward/pleasure.
Whether you actually subscribe to the school of thought that it does or doesn't
take part in actually experiencing that pleasure, the fact remains something
has to already be pleasant or interesting to cause a dopamine shot.
That some music you like or a video game or watching Star Trek or really
whatever enjoyable activity produces a dopamine shot, just says that you do
like it.
Just about the only kind of life that would be free from such "intoxication"
would be to never experience anything pleasant or any kind of drive/desire.
Also, you'd probably have Parkinson. It's not the kind of existence almost
anyone actually has, nor the kind of existence anyone would want.
Well, except if it's those evil music/comics/games addicts. Then their having
an existence which includes any fun is obviously eeeevil.