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It's funny you post this today. I was just looking at some similar studies recently. Check this one out:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/0...sical-pleasure/
Blackwell on Health: Study reveals brain chemistry behind musical pleasure
A flavourful dinner, sex and cocaine all do it. And now there is evidence, from a new Canadian study, that intensely pleasurable music – a much more abstract stimulus – also triggers release of dopamine, a key element of the brain’s reward system. Not only that, but mere anticipation of a favourite musical passage can prompt a dopamine surge, though in a different region of the brain, researchers at McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute concluded.
The scientists studied the brains of their subjects with PET scans and functional MRI, which tracks changes over time, not just a snapshot in time like regular MRI. Participants were asked to pick music that gave them intense pleasure, so much so that they actually felt “chills” at certain points. Researchers then examined what was happening in the brain during those chilling moments of musical satisfaction.
The scans showed there was a release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain implicated in the euphoric qualities of psychostimulants like cocaine, during the pleasurable passages. There was also dopamine produced in the lead-up to those sections in another part of the brain, linked to how people respond to rewarding stimuli.
Conclude the authors:
Dopamine is pivotal for establishing and maintaining behaviour. If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued.
These results further speak to why music can be effectively used in rituals, marketing or film to manipulate hedonic states.
And this:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2726.html
(a longer and more scientific article detailing the study)
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