According to a recent study published in the journal “ Celebral Cortex », The music would act on different brain regions, thus releasing emotions. Different areas of the brain are awake depending on the style of music being listened to.
Music and emotions, a link made by neural circuits?
Researchers from the University of Turku (Finland) carried out a study on 102 people. Participants listened to different styles of music, “ happy, sad, fearful and tender During a brain scan, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers have discovered what types of neural mechanisms underlie emotional responses to music: The auditory cortex and motor cortex wake up when a person listens to sad or happy music. The first deals with the acoustic elements of the music (rhythm and melody) while the activation of the second reacts because “ music inspires feelings of movement in listeners, even when listening to music while standing still in an MRI machine »Emphasizes researcher Vesa Putkinen. To find out, the researchers also used a machine learning algorithm to map which regions of the brain were activated.
” Music can induce a strong subjective experience of emotions, but one wonders if these responses engage the same neural circuits as emotions elicited by other events. »Say the researchers.
The same mechanism as with films?
The brain mechanisms that provoke emotions in a film are different from those provoked by music. Indeed, they are activated by a deeper part of the brain: the limbic system, which regulates emotions in a real situation. This difference ” possibly due to the fact that movies can more realistically ‘copy’ real life events that evoke emotions and thus activate innate emotional mechanisms “. The researchers conclude by saying that “ the results indicate that different basic music-induced emotions have distinct representations in regions supporting auditory processing and motor control but do not rely heavily on brain regions essential for emotions with survival value »They conclude.
