If you listen to new music, you’re boosting your mental health. This is according to new study published in the journal Science, which found that listening to new music is rewarding for brain wellness. The Canadian team of scientists used MRI scans, which allowed them to discover that areas in the reward center of the brain became active when you hear a song for the first time. This region of the brain is called the nucleus accumbens, and it demonstrated the strongest connections when the listener really enjoyed what they were hearing.
According to Dr Valorie Salimpoor, from the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, ‘We know that the nucleus accumbens is involved with reward. But music is abstract: It’s not like you are really hungry and you are about to get a piece of food and you are really excited about it because you are going to eat it – or the same thing applies to sex or money – that’s when you would normally see activity in the nucleus accumbens. But what’s cool is that you’re anticipating and getting excited over something entirely abstract – and that’s the next sound that is coming up.’
The study took place at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, where 19 volunteers were played 60 excerpts of new music, based on their musical preferences, whilst they lay in an MRI machine. The tracks were 30 seconds long, and as they were listening to them, the participants had to the opportunity to buy the ones they liked in a mocked up online music store. The researchers then analysed the scans, noted the degree to which the nucleus accumbens was “lighting up”, and so could predict whether the participant was likely to buy a song.
Dr Salimpoor explained, ‘As they are listening to this music, we can look at their brain activity and figure out how they are appreciating or enjoying this music before they even tell us anything. And that’s part of this new direction that neuroscience is going in – trying to understand what people are thinking, and inferring their thoughts and motivations and eventually their behaviour through their brain activity.’
Comments are closed.