Do you ever hear a song and instantly fall in love with it? Instantly hate it? You only hear 20-30 seconds of the song and you most likely will decide if you like it or not. How does our brain do this? How from such a small sample do we know that we like the song or not? I guess it’s easier to decide if you like it or not if it’s from a genre you enjoy. What exactly in our brains give us this taste in music and quick ability to judge a song?
One explanation comes from a study that studies the reward value people got from listening to music from their auditory cortex and nucleus accumben. Those both are affiliated with the reward circuit of the brain. When the brain hears something that it likes, it is sent to the auditory cortex and nucleus acumen and the response is that dopamine is released. This happens so fast, which is why our brains can hear a little bit of a song and instantly know if we like it or not. The dopamine makes us want to hear more and agree with other songs that sound similar. This only happens with humans though due to our memory, experience, and the way our auditory cortex processes information. Although animals may not remember or pick up music like we do, they still react and enjoy it.
Another reason we react so quickly to music is because of past experiences we’ve had with other types of music that sound similar. At our age, we have enough experience with different types of music genres and types for our brains to have had “record” a certain type of music that we prefer or go nuts about. Genres we like instantly release dopamine from the ‘pleasure center’ to out parts of our brains when we hear them. From this picture of the brain
, the pleasure center is the center of the activity of the arrows. The arrows indicate where the dopamine is flowing when we hear a song we like. The pleasure center basically evaluates how you will like a song based on previous songs you enjoy. This is why it’s easy to like a new band in your favorite genre so quickly as opposed to listening to a completely new genre where you will most likely not like it. The pleasure center is also connected with emotions, which is another way the brain evaluates if you might enjoy the song or not.
Emotions, memory, pleasure, and preference all go into liking and choosing what types of music you like. The connections that our brains make in split seconds are possible due to all of the previous knowledge it contains from you just living your life. Dopamine plays a huge part in what music we like because depending on how much is released will depend on how much you enjoy the song or not. From researching this, I found out a lot about how the human brain works and what connects with what to enjoy stuff, but it made me think, do animals enjoy things like we do? You saw the elephant enjoy the classical music, but did he really enjoy it? What type of music really calms or energizes animals? This is something I’m going to have to look into.
My most recent post was actually very similar to this. I wondered why things taste good to us. We have preferences in food as well as music and we never question why. It is interesting that some of the answers as to why we like certain foods are similar to why we like certain music. When it comes to food it also depends on personal reactions in the brain. However, taste changes over time and can even depend on our current surroundings. I wonder if music is the same? Do our music preferences change due to our mood or or even more specific factors like what color the room we are sitting in is? It is very interesting how the two subjects overlap.
This post was very analytical into a subject which I, for an extended period of time, considered to be something relatively simple, something I considered to be no more elaborate than a person’s simple preferences. It always seemed to be that people just enjoyed different types of music, the same way people enjoy different types of foods.
But now that you bring all these factors into play, I’m curious about these “pleasure centers”, wondering if they may actually be more defining about a human’s personality than we’ve ever thought before. After all, we notice in society that sometimes certain groups of people tend to have certain musical preferences. Just as a basic example, people who like classical music could have a higher tendency to read, or people who like rap may have a higher tendency to be more competitive (or the reverse causation for both). Do these pleasure centers tell us about a person’s hobbies, or interests, likes/dislikes? Does the pleasure center develop collaterally as a person develops a particular knowledge? Or, perhaps, does listening to a certain music for an extended period of time alter it to enjoy other other types? And finally, if the pleasure center does actually have some correlation with intelligence, could it be altered to enjoy music that makes a human brain smarter? And if that’s the case, why doesn’t every human brain naturally enjoy music that makes it more intelligent, because intelligent humans are better fit for survival?
Many of these answers regarding music and the human mind (the pleasure center, and all other parts of the brain mentioned) I was unable to find doing moderate research. Some answers regarding what is known as the “Mozart Effect”, I found here. But all in all, the post was excellent and raised more questions than I realized I could’ve had about “Why a person enjoys music.”