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| Science & Technology |
| Your favorite music can send your brain into a pleasure overload |
| 2020-11-03 |
| [Med Press] We all know that moment when we're in the car, at a concert or even sitting on our sofa and one of our favorite songs is played. It's the one that has that really good chord in it, flooding your system with pleasurable emotions, joyful memories, making your hair stand on edge, and even sending a shiver or "chill" down your spine. About half of people get chills when listening to music. Neuroscientists based in France have now used EEG to link chills to multiple brain regions involved in activating reward and pleasure systems. The results are published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Thibault Chabin and colleagues at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Besancon EEG-scanned the brains of 18 French participants who regularly experience chills when listening to their favorite musical pieces. In a questionnaire, they were asked to indicate when they experienced chills, and rate their degree of pleasure from them. "Participants of our study were able to precisely indicate "chill-producing" moments in the songs, but most musical chills occurred in many parts of the extracts and not only in the predicted moments," says Chabin. When the participants experienced a chill, Chabin saw specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (a region involved in emotional processing), the supplementary motor area (a mid-brain region involved in movement control) and the right temporal lobe (a region on the right side of the brain involved in auditory processing and musical appreciation). These regions work together to process music, trigger the brain's reward systems, and release dopamine—a "feel-good" hormone and neurotransmitter. Combined with the pleasurable anticipation of your favorite part of the song, this produces the tingly chill you experience—a physiological response thought to indicate greater cortical connectivity. "The fact that we can measure this phenomenon with EEG brings opportunities for study in other contexts, in scenarios that are more natural and within groups," Chabin comments. "This represents a good perspective for musical emotion research." |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #6 #1 Man after my own heart, Le 1er Regt de Parachutiste, from the Col Jeanpierre days. |
| Posted by: Cesare 2020-11-03 13:08 |
| #5 Amazon funding the Washington Post. Just saying there are other publisher outlets. |
| Posted by: Woodrow 2020-11-03 09:55 |
| #4 Thanks Mike. I just left the Amazon checkout lane. About the author, Daniel J. Levitin Daniel J. Levitin is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) in California. He is also the James McGill Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Music at McGill University, Montreal. "This Is Your Brain on Music" , "The World in Six Songs", "The Organized Mind" and "A Field Guide to Lies" (republished in paperback as "Weaponized Lies") were all #1 best-sellers. His work has been translated into 22 languages. Before becoming a neuroscientist, he worked as a session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, contributing to records by Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, and Blue Oyster Cult. He has published extensively in scientific journals as well as music magazines such as Grammy and Billboard. Recent musical performances include playing guitar and saxophone with Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Rosanne Cash, David Byrne, Cris Williamson, Victor Wooten, and Rodney Crowell. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2020-11-03 07:50 |
| #3 A worthwhile tome on the subject. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-11-03 07:45 |
| #2 By the same token, it only takes a few moments of hearing the dreck that the |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2020-11-03 07:42 |
| #1 It may be the trombones, but try some Edith Piaf |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2020-11-03 07:05 |