For those who have the minhag not to listen to music during sefirah, it’s been a difficult few weeks thus far. A recent study published in the journal Science may explain exactly why this is so, exploring the linkage between music and activity in certain regions of the brain. The April 12th study found that new music rewards the brain, since the more the nucleus accumbens (an area deep in the brain) is activated, the more likely people are to spend money on new music. The likelihood increases when the nucleus accumbens interacts with a brain region that stores memories of old music.
The study helps explain how something as transitory and intangible as a series of musical notes can be so gratifying. According to study researcher Valorie Salimpoor, a doctoral student at McGill University in Canada, “It’s all happening in your head. You have nothing to show for it. But somehow, because we have the cognitive resources to be able to process and appreciate these temporal sound patterns, we can experience really intense emotions from them.”
Music is an art that has deep roots in the human experience and it spans across cultures and time. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December substantiates this idea by reporting that even across very different cultures; people represent basic emotions through music in astonishingly similar ways.
Music involves emotion-processing regions of the brain and triggers the release of dopamine, a neurochemical associated with feelings of reward and pleasure, reported Salimpoor and her colleagues in an earlier study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Food, a necessary aspect of survival, also triggers the release of dopamine. The earlier study found that people didn’t only receive shocks of dopamine at their favorite parts of a song, but right before, too. This suggests that part of the pleasure of music listening comes from anticipation, although it’s hard to pinpoint where the anticipation stems from. “Are you anticipating your favorite part because you know it’s coming up, or is it the case that you have some general knowledge of music based on all your previous experiences?” Salimpoor said.
To further explore this, Salimpoor and fellow researchers recruited 126 participants and narrowed them down to 19 people who had very similar music tastes, all of whom liked electronica and indie music. The researchers used music-recommendation programs to find songs the participants had never before heard, and then had them listen to those songs in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). Researchers used the fMRI to monitor blood flow to various brain regions; this blood flow, in turn, is correlated with activity in those regions. After hearing a song clip, participants could choose to buy the tune with their own money, spending between one dollar and two depending on how much they liked it. The researchers found a strong link between how much a person was prepared to spend and the nucleus accumbens: a more active nucleus accumbens was related to more willingness to spend. This brain region is known to be associated with reward, particularly forming expectations of reward.
“It’s really cool, because it’s suggesting that as we’re listening to new music, we’re constantly making predictions,” Salimpoor said. “This really links back to our previous study of anticipation and why it would play a role in music.”
Furthermore, the more willing people were to spend more on a song, the greater co-activity their nucleus accumbens showed with another brain region called the superior temporal gyrus, an auditory region that stores sense memories of music heard in the past. For example, if you’ve heard a lot of country music, your superior temporal gyrus will have different storage content than if you grew up listening to rock. This means that when you hear new music, your brain flips through the “library” in your superior temporal gyrus, building expectations from patterns of music heard in the past. If those expectations are met or surpassed, a listener may find himself loving the new tune. Essentially, Salimpoor says, “We can look at music as an intellectual reward. It’s essentially pattern recognition, and this is something humans are very good at.”
Other brain regions were also associated with finding music rewarding, including the amygdala, responsible for emotion-processing, and two higher-level emotion-processing regions found in the frontal lobe. The inferior frontal gyrus, also located in the frontal lobe, was similarly connected to finding music pleasurable. This area is responsible for advanced thought, working memory, and pattern sequencing.
“The fact that the brain recruits these advanced brain regions may explain why humans seem alone among animals in appreciating music,” Salimpoor said. “We’re able to obtain pleasure from a sequence of sound that has no inherent reward in itself.”