How does the Brain reacts to Music we like.

Researchers from Stanford reported that when listening to a new piece of classical music, different people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in several brain areas, suggesting some level of universal experience. 

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as participants listened to the first 30 seconds of 60 unfamiliar songs. To quantify how much they liked the music, 

All of the participants had to listen to the same set of never-heard-before songs, and decide if they would be willing to buy the song. 

19 volunteers who had indicated similar preferences, mostly electronic and indie music. The researchers created a playlist with genre of music of the volunteers liked.

The brain scans highlighted the nucleus accumbens, often referred to as the brain’s ‘pleasure center’, a deep region of the brain that connects to dopamine neurons and is activated during eating, gambling and sex. It turns out that connections between the nucleus accumbens and several other brain areas could predict how much a participant was willing to spend on a given song. Those areas included the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotion, the hippocampus, which is important for learning and memory, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision-making.

It all depends on past musical experiences and these previous experiences become on templates.

So why is it that one person might spend $$ on a song while another pans it?  Whether you realize it or not, every time you’re listening to music, you’re constantly activating these templates that you have. Using those musical memory templates, the nucleus accumbens then acts as a prediction machine

This study reveals important information on the way the brain works, and we can infer a lot of things starting on the patterns that the brain show but lets just keep inform on this.

This is a extract. To view the full article: NatGeo

    Follow @MBeatboxx