Iranian scientist finds out why music is pleasurable to brain

TEHRAN (ISNA)- New studies in neurology led by an Iranian scholar explored the reason that why music is interpreted as pleasurable by the brain.

Niloufar Salimpour recruited 19 volunteers, 10 men and nine women aged 18 to 37, who shared musical tastes. She played 30-second samples of 60 songs they'd never heard. Within an iTunes-like user interface, the volunteers then bid on how much they'd be willing to pay for each track, up to $2.

To make the experiment more realistic, participants used their own money and received a CD of their purchased tracks at the end of the study.

Salimpour monitored how the volunteers' brains reacted to the music using MRI. Multiple brain regions activated when they discovered a new favorite song, but only activity in the nucleus accumbens was well correlated to how much the participants were willing to pay, she and colleagues have reported online in Science.

Salimpour added that it may seem surprising, but people enjoyed when their expectations were violated.

In 2011, Salimpour and one of her colleagues Zatorre confirmed that dopamine, a reward neurotransmitter, is the source of such intense experiences - the ''chills'' - associated with a favorite piece of music. They showed that listeners' dopamine levels in pleasure centers surged during key passages of favorite music, but also just a moment before - as if the brain was anticipating the crescendo to come.