Why Does Music Feel So Good Phenomena Only Human. One day several years ago Valorie Salimpoor took a drive that would change the course of her life. She was at the peak of what she now calls her quarter life crisis, not knowing what kind of career she wanted or how she might use her undergraduate neuroscience training. Hoping an outing might clear her head, that day she jumped in her car and switched on the radio. She heard the charging tempo and jaunty, teasing violin of Johannes Brahmss Hungarian Dance No. This piece of music came on, and something just happened, Salimpoor recalls. I just felt this rush of emotion come through me. It was so intense. She pulled over to the side of the street so she could concentrate on the song and the pleasure it gave her. When the song was over, Salimpoors mind raced with questions. I was thinking, wow, what just happened A few minutes ago I was so depressed, and now Im euphoric, she says. I decided that I had to figure out how this happened that thats what Im going to do with the rest of my life. Music moves people of all cultures, in a way that doesnt seem to happen with other animals. Nobody really understands why listening to music which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners. Yesterday, for example, researchers from Stanford reported that when listening to a new piece of classical music, different people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in several brain areas, suggesting some level of universal experience. But obviously no ones experience is exactly the same. Cch2Mhqyc/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Good Music To Download 2015' title='Good Music To Download 2015' />Sam Smith Lay Me Down Red Nose Day 2015 ft. John Legend. Online file sharing and storage 15 GB free web space. Easy registration. File upload progressor. Multiple file transfer. Fast download. One Cold winter night in Toronto, the Holy Spirit entered Benny Hinns life in such a dramatic way that his life change forever. The same thing can happen to you. In todays issue of Science, Salimpoors group reports that when you listen to a song for the first time, the strength of certain neural connections can predict how much you like the music, and that these preferences are guided by what youve heard and enjoyed in the past. After Salimpoor had the car epiphany, she rushed home to her computer and Googled music and the brain. That led her to graduate school at Mc. Gill University, working in the lab of neuroscientist Robert Zatorre. A few years ago, Salimpoor and Zatorre performed another type of brain scanning experiment in which participants listened to music that gave them goosebumps or chills. The researchers then injected them with a radioactive tracer that binds to the receptors of dopamine, a chemical thats involved in motivation and reward. With this technique, called positron emission tomography or PET, the researchers showed that 1. The dopamine system is old, evolutionarily speaking, and is active in many animals during sex and eating. But animals dont get intense pleasures to music, Salimpoor says. So we knew there had to be a lot more to it. In the new experiment, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging f. MRI to track real time brain activity as participants listened to the first 3. To quantify how much they liked the music, participants were given the chance to buy the full version of each song with their own money Tunes. The program was set up like an auction, so participants would choose how much they were willing to spend on the song, with bids ranging from 0 to 2. You can imagine how tricky it was to design this experiment. All of the participants had to listen to the same set of never heard before songs, and yet, in order to get enough useable data, there had to be a reasonable chance that they would like some of the songs enough to buy them. Salimpoor began by giving 1. We asked them to list all of the music they listen to, everything they like, everything theyve ever bought, Salimpoor says. She ultimately scanned 1. In Montreal theres a big indie scene, she says. To create the list of unfamiliar songs, Salimpoor first looked at songs and artists that showed up on many of the volunteers surveys. She plugged those choices into musical recommendation programs, such as Pandora and i. Tunes, to find similar but less well known selections. She also asked people who worked at local music stores what new songs theyd recommend in those genres. Good Music To Download 2015' title='Good Music To Download 2015' />Watch Good Morning America Full Episodes Online. 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Those areas included the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotion, the hippocampus, which is important for learning and memory, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making. The data are compelling, especially because the study objectively quantified the participants preferences, notes Thalia Wheatley, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College who has studied links between music, motion and emotion. The emphasis on connectivity between regions, rather than any particular region by itself, is also intriguing, she says. Cortical activity alone does not predict bid value. Hooking up the temporal and evaluative processing in the cortex with the more primitive reward areas appears to be the key. So why is it that one person might spend 2 on a song while another pans it Salimpoor says it all depends on past musical experiences. Depending on what styles youre used to Eastern, Western, jazz, heavy metal, pop all of these have very different rules they follow, and theyre all implicitly recorded in your brain, she says. Whether you realize it or not, every time youre listening to music, youre constantly activating these templates that you have. Using those musical memory templates, the nucleus accumbens then acts as a prediction machine, she says. It predicts the reward that youll feel from a given piece of music based on similar types of music youve heard before. If you like it better than predicted, it registers as intense pleasure. If you feel worse than predicted, you feel bored or disappointed. Skins For Winamp Player. New music is presumably rewarding not only because it fits implicitly learned patterns but because it deviates from those patterns, however slightly, Wheatley says. But this finding leads to new questions. It just made me wonder whether people have different preferences or tolerances for how much a new song deviates from the well worn path of previously heard music structures. There are lots of other questions for future studies to probe. How does our brain make those musical templates How long do we have to listen to a song before we know whether we like it Why did my sister and I have such drastically different musical tastes growing up, even though our exposures were pretty much the same But for now the study has given Salimpoor a new way to think about what happened to her that day in the car. That day, it all seemed like such a big mystery what the heck is happening in my brain she says. But if she heard the song again today, shed be able to tell a reasonable story of her minds workings. Id be like, oh my god I just released dopamine, and my nucleus accumbens is now communicating with the superior temporal gyrus, and thats pulling up some other memories of when I was 1.