Study: Music triggers feel-good chemical

Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says.

The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, the study found.

Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. The new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly.

While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It's active in particular circuits of the brain.

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online yesterday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said.

Eight volunteers were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

The volunteers chose a wide range of music, from classical and jazz to punk, tango and even bagpipes. - AP