Listening to the pieces of music that we enjoy the most, our brain anticipates the release of dopamine, the pleasure hormone. It even creates chills in some.
-1604416078.jpg "Why some music gives us goosebumps")
- Our brain reacts positively when we listen to one of our favorite music.
- On certain passages that we greatly appreciate, the brain releases dopamine, the reward hormone
- In some people, this release of dopamine is so intense that it triggers chills.
Music not only softens morals, it is also good for our brains. Neuroscientists from the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, located in Besançon, have discovered that the musical passages we like the most are able to make us shiver, by releasing dopamine in our brain. The results of their study were published on November 3, 2020 in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
In search of gratification
For this experiment, the researchers recruited 18 music-loving volunteers. All these people claim to feel pleasure while listening to music. Sitting in an armchair with their eyes closed, the participants listened to five musical excerpts that they had chosen themselves and three others selected by the experimenters. Beforehand, the participants had specified which were the moments that created these famous chills.
Each excerpt was cut by a 30-second pause without music, and the participants were provided with a remote control to indicate the emotions this aroused in them. Using an electroencephalogram, the team was able to analyze the behavior of their brain.
“Participants in our study were able to accurately pinpoint ‘thrill’ moments in songs, but most musical thrills occurred in many parts of the snippets, not just the intended moments.”, indicates Thibault Chabin, doctoral student in the neuroscience laboratory of the Bougogne Franche-Comté University.
A shot of dopamine
When the musical thrills arrive, low-frequency electrical signals called “theta activity” increase or decrease in the regions of the brain that are responsible for musical processing. However, most of the participants claim to have had difficulty in distinguishing the weak moments of pleasure.
During periods of shivering, electrical activity spiked in the orbitofrontal cortex (the section that processes emotions), the supplementary motor area (which controls movement), and the right temporal lobe (which handles auditory processing and musical appreciation). Together, these regions process music, trigger the brain’s reward system, and release dopamine, the pleasure hormone. Combined with the anticipation of listening to your favorite passage in a piece, it produces the famous thrill.
“Most intriguingly, music seems to have no biological benefit for us. However, the involvement of dopamine and the reward system in the processing of musical pleasure suggests an ancestral function for music.observes Thibault Chabin. Musical pleasure is a very interesting phenomenon that deserves to be studied further, in order to understand why music is rewarding and also to discover why it is essential in the life of human beings.”
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