Neuroscientists used electroencephalography to determine thatListening to favorite songswhich can increase dopamine and trigger a feeling of happiness in the brain. They used an EEG to link goosebumps to multiple brain regions. These are involved in activating reward and pleasure systems in the brain.
Can listening to music increase dopamine?
About half of people get goosebumps when listening to their favorite music. This overfills certain receptors in the brain with pleasant emotions and joyful memories. In addition, the process evokes a feeling of pleasure in the body. Thibault Chabin and colleagues from the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Besançon scanned the brains of 18 French participants. They regularly experience feelings of happiness when they listen to their favorite pieces of music. In a questionnaire they were asked to indicate when they felt this to rate their happiness. When participants entered such a state, Chabin saw specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. This is a region involved in emotional processing. It is located in the supplementary motor area of the midbrain, which is responsible for controlling movement.
Such activity was also detected in the right temporal lobe. This region on the right side of the brain is involved in auditory processing and musical appreciation. These regions work together toto process music, which trigger the brain's reward systems and increase dopamine. This is a feel-good hormone and at the same time a neurotransmitter. Combined with the pleasant anticipation of your favorite part of the song, this creates the tingly goosebumps that people experience in such situations. This is a physiological response that indicates greater cortical connectivity. So the fact that researchers can measure this phenomenon with EEG offers opportunities for studies in other contexts and in scenarios that are more natural and within groups.
Study results
The study authors wanted to measure how cerebral and physiological activities of multiple participants are coupled in natural, social musical environments. According to them, musical pleasure is a very interesting phenomenon. This deserves to be explored further to understand why listening to music is so worthwhile.The Studywas conducted on 18 healthy participants, 11 of whom were women and 7 men. They possessed a range of musical abilities. So a high-density EEG scan was performed while participants listened to snippets of their most entertaining music for 15 minutes. While listening, participants were told to rate their subjectively perceived pleasure. In total, this type of condition was reported 305 times, each lasting an average of 8.75 s. These results implied increased brain activity in regions previously associated with musical pleasure in other studies.
