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Music, drugs stimulate same part of brain, says study

Posted on: 10/Feb/2017 12:33:35 PM
Researchers have found that the same brain-chemical system that is stimulated by listening to our favourite music also mediates the feelings of pleasure from sex, recreational drugs and tasty food. The researchers are from the McGill University in Canada.

Say the researchers, This is the first demonstration that the brain`s own opioids are directly involved in musical pleasure. While previous work by Levitin`s lab and others had used neuroimaging to map areas of the brain that are active during moments of musical pleasure, scientists were able only to infer the involvement of the opioid system. We measured participants` responses to music, and found that even the participants` favourite songs no longer elicited feelings of pleasure. But the anecdotes - the impressions our participants shared with us after the experiment - were fascinating. One said: I know this is my favorite song but it doesn`t feel like it usually does. Anytime you give prescription drugs to college students who don`t need them for health reasons, you have to be very careful to ensure against any possible ill effects. For example, all 17 participants were required to have had a blood test within the year preceding the experiment, to ensure they did not have any conditions that would be made worse by the drug. Music`s universality and its ability to deeply affect emotions suggest an evolutionary origin, and the new findings add to the growing body of evidence for the evolutionary biological substrates of music.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.