Music Sends a Pleasurable Chill Through The Brain, And Scientists Can See It
CLARE WATSON3 NOVEMBER 2020
Whether it's Mozart or metal, listening to music can be an intense, even euphoric experience. Hearing your favourite tune might bring up joyful memories soaked in nostalgia, while a soaring melody might send a chill down your spine.
This tingly 'chill' sensation you feel can actually be seen on brain scans; has been linked to an activation of the brain's reward and pleasure systems in previous brain imaging studies. Now, scientists have analysed the patterns of brain activity associated with pleasurable musical chills.
In this study, a high-density EEG device was used to measure waves of electrical activity in people's brains as they listened to music with headphones in their ears and electrodes on their scalps.
The research team asked 11 women and 7 men (who said they often experience waves of musical pleasure) to listen to a 15-minute collection of 90-second sound bites. Some excerpts were taken from the participants' favourite chill-inducing music, and other recordings were selected by the researchers.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/music-sends-a-pleasurable-chill-through-the-brain-and-scientists-can-see-it
3-NOV-2020
Your favorite music can send your brain into a pleasure overload
Bringing neuroscience out of the laboratory and into the concert hall
FRONTIERS
Research News
We all know that moment when we're in the car, at a concert or even sitting on our sofa and one of our favorite songs is played. It's the one that has that really good chord in it, flooding your system with pleasurable emotions, joyful memories, making your hair stand on edge, and even sending a shiver or "chill" down your spine. About half of people get chills when listening to music. Neuroscientists based in France have now used EEG to link chills to multiple brain regions involved in activating reward and pleasure systems. The results are published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Thibault Chabin and colleagues at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in Besançon EEG-scanned the brains of 18 French participants who regularly experience chills when listening to their favorite musical pieces. In a questionnaire, they were asked to indicate when they experienced chills, and rate their degree of pleasure from them.
"Participants of our study were able to precisely indicate "chill-producing" moments in the songs, but most musical chills occurred in many parts of the extracts and not only in the predicted moments," says Chabin.
When the participants experienced a chill, Chabin saw specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (a region involved in emotional processing), the supplementary motor area (a mid-brain region involved in movement control) and the right temporal lobe (a region on the right side of the brain involved in auditory processing and musical appreciation). These regions work together to process music, trigger the brain's reward systems, and release dopamine -- a "feel-good" hormone and neurotransmitter. Combined with the pleasurable anticipation of your favorite part of the song, this produces the tingly chill you experience -- a physiological response thought to indicate greater cortical connectivity.
More:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/f-yfm102320.php
= new reply since forum marked as read
Surely there are international laws prohibiting such things, aren’t there?
