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#Post#: 3893--------------------------------------------------
National Geographic
By: JEV Date: April 14, 2013, 9:31 am
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Why Does Music Feel So Good?
by Virginia Hughes
One day several years ago Valorie Salimpoor took a drive that
would change the course of her life. She was at the peak of what
she now calls her “quarter-life crisis,” not knowing what kind
of career she wanted or how she might use her undergraduate
neuroscience training. Hoping an outing might clear her head,
that day she jumped in her car and switched on the radio. She
heard the charging tempo and jaunty, teasing violin of Johannes
Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5.
“This piece of music came on, and something just happened,”
Salimpoor recalls. “I just felt this rush of emotion come
through me. It was so intense.” She pulled over to the side of
the street so she could concentrate on the song and the pleasure
it gave her.
When the song was over, Salimpoor’s mind raced with questions.
“I was thinking, wow, what just happened? A few minutes ago I
was so depressed, and now I’m euphoric,” she says. “I decided
that I had to figure out how this happened — that that’s what
I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”
Music moves people of all cultures, in a way that doesn’t seem
to happen with other animals. Nobody really understands why
listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic
value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences.
Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out
with the help of brain scanners.
Yesterday, for example, researchers from Stanford reported that
when listening to a new piece of classical music, different
people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in
several brain areas, suggesting some level of universal
experience. But obviously no one’s experience is exactly the
same. In today’s issue of Science, Salimpoor’s group reports
that when you listen to a song for the first time, the strength
of certain neural connections can predict how much you like the
music, and that these preferences are guided by what you’ve
heard and enjoyed in the past.
After Salimpoor had the car epiphany, she rushed home to her
computer and Googled “music and the brain.” That led her to
graduate school at McGill University, working in the lab of
neuroscientist Robert Zatorre.
A few years ago, Salimpoor and Zatorre performed another type of
brain scanning experiment in which participants listened to
music that gave them goosebumps or chills. The researchers then
injected them with a radioactive tracer that binds to the
receptors of dopamine, a chemical that’s involved in motivation
and reward. With this technique, called positron emission
tomography or PET, the researchers showed that 15 minutes after
participants listened to their favorite song, their brains
flooded with dopamine.
The dopamine system is old, evolutionarily speaking, and is
active in many animals during sex and eating. “But animals don’t
get intense pleasures to music,” Salimpoor says. “So we knew
there had to be a lot more to it.”
In the new experiment, the researchers used functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as
participants listened to the first 30 seconds of 60 unfamiliar
songs. To quantify how much they liked the music, participants
were given the chance to buy the full version of each song —
with their own money! — using a computer program resembling
iTunes. The program was set up like an auction, so participants
would choose how much they were willing to spend on the song,
with bids ranging from $0 to $2.
You can imagine how tricky it was to design this experiment. All
of the participants had to listen to the same set of
never-heard-before songs, and yet, in order to get enough
useable data, there had to be a reasonable chance that they
would like some of the songs enough to buy them.
Salimpoor began by giving 126 volunteers comprehensive surveys
about their musical preferences. “We asked them to list all of
the music they listen to, everything they like, everything
they’ve ever bought,” Salimpoor says. She ultimately scanned 19
volunteers who had indicated similar preferences, mostly
electronic and indy music. “In Montreal there’s a big indy
scene,” she says.
To create the list of unfamiliar songs, Salimpoor first looked
at songs and artists that showed up on many of the volunteers’
surveys. She plugged those choices into musical recommendation
programs, such as Pandora and iTunes, to find similar but less
well-known selections. She also asked people who worked at local
music stores what new songs they’d recommend in those genres.
HTML http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/04/salimpoor2HR-990x592.jpg
The brain scans highlighted the nucleus accumbens, often
referred to as the brain’s ‘pleasure center’, a deep region of
the brain that connects to dopamine neurons and is activated
during eating, gambling and sex. It turns out that connections
between the nucleus accumbens and several other brain areas
could predict how much a participant was willing to spend on a
given song. Those areas included the amygdala, which is involved
in processing emotion, the hippocampus, which is important for
learning and memory, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex,
which is involved in decision-making.
The data are “compelling,” especially because the study
objectively quantified the participants’ preferences, notes
Thalia Wheatley, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College who
has studied links between music, motion and emotion. The
emphasis on connectivity between regions, rather than any
particular region by itself, is also intriguing, she says.
”Cortical activity alone does not predict bid value. Hooking up
the temporal and evaluative processing in the cortex with the
(more primitive) reward areas appears to be the key.”
So why is it that one person might spend $2 on a song while
another pans it? Salimpoor says it all depends on past musical
experiences. “Depending on what styles youre used to — Eastern,
Western, jazz, heavy metal, pop — all of these have very
different rules they follow, and they’re all implicitly recorded
in your brain,” she says. “Whether you realize it or not, every
time you’re listening to music, you’re constantly activating
these templates that you have.”
Using those musical memory templates, the nucleus accumbens then
acts as a prediction machine, she says. It predicts the reward
that you’ll feel from a given piece of music based on similar
types of music you’ve heard before. If you like it better than
predicted, it registers as intense pleasure. If you feel worse
than predicted, you feel bored or disappointed.
“New music is presumably rewarding not only because it fits
implicitly learned patterns but because it deviates from those
patterns, however slightly,” Wheatley says. But this finding
leads to new questions. “It just made me wonder whether people
have different preferences or tolerances for how much a new song
deviates from the well-worn path of previously heard music
structures.”
There are lots of other questions for future studies to probe.
How does our brain make those musical templates? How long do we
have to listen to a song before we know whether we like it? Why
did my sister and I have such drastically different musical
tastes growing up, even though our exposures were pretty much
the same?
But for now the study has given Salimpoor a new way to think
about what happened to her that day in the car. ”That day, it
all seemed like such a big mystery — what the heck is happening
in my brain?” she says. But if she heard the song again today,
she’d be able to tell a reasonable story of her mind’s workings.
“I’d be like, oh my god I just released dopamine, and my nucleus
accumbens is now communicating with the superior temporal gyrus,
and that’s pulling up some other memories of when I was 12 and
playing the violin,” she says, laughing. “And then that’s
linking it to my visual centers, so I can imagine this perfect
synchronized orchestra and me playing a violin in there. And I’d
be predicting the next sounds from each instrument in the
orchestra, and the whole orchestra, so it’s a local and global
prediciton going on at the same time.”
Music, she says, is an intellectual reward. “It’s really an
exercise for your whole brain.”
Source:
HTML http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/11/why-does-music-feel-so-good/?source=hp_dl4_why_does_music_feel_so_good_20130413
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