The rewards of music listening: Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system

V. Menon (a,b,c) and D.J. Levitin (d)

NeuroImage 28 (2005), 175-184

a) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
b) Program in Neuroscience, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
c) Neurosciences Institute at Stanford, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
d) Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1B1

Abstract:

Although the neural underpinnings of music cognition have been widely studied in the last 5 years, relatively little is known about the neuroscience underlying emotional reactions that music induces in listeners. Many people spend a significant amount of time listening to music, and its emotional power is assumed but not well understood. Here, we use functional and effective connectivity analyses to show for the first time that listening to music strongly modulates activity in a network of mesolimbic structures involved in reward processing including the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as well as the hypothalamus and insula, which are thought to be involved in regulating autonomic and physiological responses to rewarding and emotional stimuli. Responses in the NAc and the VTA were strongly correlated pointing to an association between dopamine release and NAc response to music. Responses in the NAc and the hypothalamus were also strongly correlated across subjects, suggesting a mechanism by which listening to pleasant music evokes physiological reactions. Effective connectivity confirmed these findings, and showed significant VTA-mediated interaction of the NAc with the hypothalamus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex. The enhanced functional and effective connectivity between brain regions mediating reward, autonomic, and cognitive processing provides insight into understanding why listening to music is one of the most rewarding and pleasurable human experiences.
(Bold text emphasis by Martin Braun)

Comment:

In 2004, Sutoo and Akiyama showed for the first time that music raises dopamine levels in the brain of rats. Because their experiments cannot be carried out on humans, it remained unknown if music raises dopamine levels also in humans. Menon and Levitin have now for the first time shown strong indications from connectivity analyses based on brain imaging data that this indeed is the case. Why the dopaminergic neurons in the upper part of the brain stem (ventral tegmental area, VTA) should respond to an increased order in the activity of auditory neurons, as occurs during music exposure, remains to be explored. When investigating this question it may be useful to remember the so-called frequency following response (FFR) that can be recorded from the human skull during exposure to harmonic complex tones. The neuron potentials that cause the FFR are generated in the auditory midbrain, and thus in close proximity to the dopaminergic neurons in the VTA. So, there would be good reasons to bear in mind the possibility of an electrotonic influence of the auditory midbrain upon the dopaminergic neurons in the VTA.
(Comment Martin Braun)

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