A Sri Lankan Bumpkin

science:

Music is present in all cultures. It’s a very basic thing that nearly all humans enjoy, but unlike, say, food or sex, we can’t connect it to any survival advantage. So why is there music, and what is it we enjoy about it? Those are some questions the Auditory Processing Laboratory at Montreal Neurological Institute is trying to investigate. In a series of papers, scientists from the institute have been experimenting with jaw-dropping, chill-inducing, spine-tingling music, trying to figure out what makes intensely pleasurable music so pleasurable. They’ve figured out that the rewarding aspects of music are related to emotional arousal (well, duh). That intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with brain activity in regions that have to do with emotion and reward, suggesting that music taps into pathways that reward us for doing this that do confer evolutionary survival advantages. And, slightly less obvious, great music triggers dopamine release, and “the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release within an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself.” The anticipation and build-up to a musical peak experience also releases dopamine, but via a different mechanism than the release that happens at the peak.

This is the way basic research works: first, you confirm the things that seem obvious. Then you can start branching out and testing slightly less obvious things. All the surprising, groundbreaking research depends on the kind of “well, duh” research that confirms such things as, yes, music is pleasurable because it is emotionally arousing.

The participants in the “chill-inducing music” study chose their own music, and the site includes a list of the most popular songs and passages in the study. They range from Vivaldi to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Tiesto.