How Music Sends Our Brain into a Pleasure Overload

Scientists have taken a closer look at how multiple brain regions are involved in activating reward and pleasure systems through music. The results were published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

A team of researchers at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté performed EEG scans of 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, the supplementary motor area, and the right temporal lobe. 

"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."

This ancestral function may lie in the period of time we spend in anticipation of the chill-inducing part of the music. As we wait, our brains are busy predicting the future and releasing dopamine. Evolutionarily speaking, being able to predict what will happen next is essential for survival. "We want to measure how cerebral and physiological activities of multiple participants are coupled in natural, social musical settings," Chabin says. "Musical pleasure is a very interesting phenomenon that deserves to be investigated further, in order to understand why music is rewarding and unlock why music is essential in human lives."