Canadian scientists from the Institute of Neurology at McGill University have identified a pattern between listening to new music and the activation of the so-called pleasure center in the human brain.
This center also stimulates the enjoyment of food, sex, and receiving material wealth.
Scientists emphasize that music is something abstract.
Food, money or gifts, and intimate pleasures are very specific objects or actions, but the “pleasure center” responded to the immaterial first sounds of the melody that one likes, just as it did to material “irritants”.
The study involved 19 subjects with different musical preferences. According to these preferences, they were given 60 songs to listen to.
With the help of magnetic resonance imaging, scientists monitored the reaction to sounds in the nucleus accumbens – a part of the brain that is part of the “pleasure center”.
It turned out that the connection between neurons in the nucleus accumbens became stronger, the more pleasure a person received from the sounds of a new pleasant melody.
