NRSC 4132 Blog

Have you ever been frustrated while driving in traffic only to turn on the music and feel better? I believe that most people would agree with me when I say music is absolutely essential to life and can turn a bad day around with a simple chorus.

In January 2011 issue of Nature Neuroscience, the article "Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music", endogenous dopamine released in the striatum was found to occur at peak arousal while listening to music. Music often elicits feelings of euphoria and joy similar to the rewards involving the striatal dopaminergic system.

Of course everyone has their own taste in music and different songs give pleasure to different people. Thus, in this study the "chills" or "musical frisson" response, a commonly used marker of peak emotional response to music, was used. This technique involves a discrete pattern of ANS arousal which allows researchers to take a subjective phenomenon (pleasure to music) and pinpoint the precise timing of optimal pleasure. Participants were asked to choose their own pleasurable music and their psychophysiological responses, such as: heart rate and respiration rate, as well as brain imaging scans were taken while they listened. Two PET scanning sessions were conducted and the sessions showed an overall increase in ANS activity during the pleasurable music condition.

These researchers used fMRI's to image the route of dopamine release. They found that the caudate was more involved during anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the emotional responses to music; indicating that enjoying your music can lead to the release of dopamine in the striatal system. More specifically the results of this study show that listening to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system. If "music-induced emotional states" can lead to dopamine release and subsequent feelings of happiness, it may explain why music is universally valued!

After reading this article I couldn't help but think about ELO's Mr. Blue Sky and how this song's lyrics allow me to feel joy regardless of where I am. With an upbeat melody and the lyrics:

Sun is shinin' in the sky
There ain't a cloud in sight
It's stopped rainin' everybody's in a play
And don't you know
It's a beautiful new day hey, hey

Runnin' down the avenue
See how the sun shines brightly in the city
On the streets where once was pity
Mister blue sky is living here today hey, hey

Mister blue sky please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long
Where did we go wrong?

Hey you with the pretty face
Welcome to the human race
A celebration, mister blue sky's up there waitin'
And today is the day we've waited for?

How could you not feel elated?!
To read this article or get more information, check out: https://cuvpn.colorado.edu/neuro/journal/v14/n2/full/,DanaInfo=www.nature.com+nn.2726.html.

The response of a brain while listening to music is very different than the response of the brain to many other types of stimuli. While observing a scene there is no direct way to see how the brain is processing the image. Many different part of the brain must integrate the cloudy points of stimulation (or lack of stimulations,) pattern recognition, and memory among other things for the person to perceive what it is they are looking at. It is a very subjective experience that is difficult for a neuroscientist to analyze. Sound on the other hand (especially simple rhythmic sound) is often very directly observable by many available neurological measurements including EEGs. This has recently been the center of much attention in neuroscience and had provided fodder for several books including This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin and Musicophelia by Oliver Sacks.
EEG studies of patient response to rhythmic beats is the focus of Tagging the Neuronal Entrainment to Beat and Meter from the Journal of Neuroscience published this July. This study tries to delineate how the human mind processes beats and meter in general. Previously many studies were done exploring how musical meter can create an expectation in the listener, you have probably experienced this yourself by tapping your foot to a song you?ve never heard before. Most music (maybe excluding some jazz and freeform types of music) follows some predictable pattern and our brains zero in on them (wonderful recognizers of pattern that they are.)The theory of resonance has been proposed to explain these observances hypothesizing that after certain exposure to the rhythmic beats (or music) large groups of neurons become ?entrained? and resonate at frequency correlating with the music?s beat. By altering the beats from what is expected scientists have studied what the call evoked potentials (or EPs.)
In the studies done in this particular article researchers at the Institute of Neuroscience of the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Brussels, Belgium had participants listen to a 2.4 Hz beat an imagine it as either a binary beat (1 2, 1 2, 1 2, as in a march) or ternary (1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, like in a waltz.) As a control they had some participants listen to the beat but did not instruct them to image a particular meter. They then monitored the response of the participants? EEGs. The researchers found that EEGs showed increases in amplitude of subharmonic frequencies in the groups that were imagining the binary and ternary beats. That means in the control group they showed a strong 2.4 Hz signal the binary group showed strong 2.4 and 1.2 Hz signal and the ternary group showed strong 2.4, 1.6, and .8 Hz signals. This supports many of the previous research done on this topic showing that direct observation of the physical experience of music can be measured and quantified using existing mode of neurological research. This may open doors to understanding how the brain processes other types of stimuli and art in the future.