Dopamine response
- Dopamine chemical response to music same as to sex
- by Malcolm Ritter - Associated Press - New York
Dopamine chemical response to music is the same as it is to sex whether it be 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 feeling the rush from it, researchers found.
Previous work already has 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 listen 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 the particular circuits of the brain.
The type dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valerie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montréal right article posted online Sunday by the journal "Nature Neuroscience".
The studies used only instrumental music, showing the voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices by contributing to the effect, she said.
The researchers describe brain-scanning experiments the researchers describe brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills particularly mullahs and some musical pieces of instruments. Back characteristically experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of music rush.
Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also experiencing dopamine effects, Zaorres said.
Pet scans show brains pumped up work 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 happen.
Dopamine surged in one part of the striatum during the 15 seconds leading up to a thrilling moment, and at a different part of the musical highlight finally arrived.
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