The Science of Musical Arousal

I thought this article was very interesting – Listening to music may not be as fun as having sex, but it triggers the same pleasure-inducing chemical in the brain. Neuroscientists at McGill University scanned the brains of volunteers as they listened to their favorite instrumental music, ranging from punk to Beethoven to bagpipes. The scans revealed that as a particularly thrilling moment of music approached , the part of the brain’s striatum region that’s involved in anticipation and prediction released the neuro-chemical dopamine–the same chemical that gives rise to pleasurable feelings associated with eating, sex, and psychoactive drugs. When the musical climax arrived, dopamine surged through a different part of the striatum. The study recruited only volunteers who claimed to get chills from certain musical passages, but researchers say the dopamine response is probably common to all listeners. Previous research has hinted at a link between dopamine and musical enjoyment, notes Harvard neurologist Gottfried Schlaug, who was not involved in the new finding, but the McGill study nails it.