From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates

Abstract

Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps because it allows expression and regulation of emotion and evokes pleasure. In this review, we present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. First, we identify some of the auditory cortical circuits that are responsible for encoding and storing tonal patterns and discuss evidence that cortical loops between auditory and frontal cortices are important for maintaining musical information in working memory and for the recognition of structural regularities in musical patterns, which then lead to expectancies. Second, we review evidence concerning the mesolimbic striatal system and its involvement in reward, motivation, and pleasure in other domains. Recent data indicate that this dopaminergic system mediates pleasure associated with music; specifically, reward value for music can be coded by activity levels in the nucleus accumbens, whose functional connectivity with auditory and frontal areas increases as a function of increasing musical reward. We propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable predictions and expectancies to emerge from sound patterns and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation.cognition | functional imaging | auditory cortex S ome 40,000 years ago, a person-a musician-picked up a vulture bone that had delicately and precisely incised holes along its length and blew upon it to play a tune. We know this thanks to recent remarkable archeological finds (Fig. 1) near the Danube, where several such flutes were uncovered (1). What bears reflection here is that, for an instrument to exist in the upper Paleolithic, music must have already existed in an advanced form for many thousands of years already; else it would have been impossible to construct something as technologically advanced as a flute that plays a particular scale. We may safely infer therefore that music is among the most ancient of human cognitive traits. Musical OriginsKnowing that music has ancient origins is important in establishing it as part of our original "human mental machinery," but it does not tell us why it may have developed. The answer to this question may always remain unknown, but for insight we may turn to Darwin. One of his most well-known comments about music, from The Descent of Man, is this one: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed" (2). Ten years later, in his autobiography, he reflected on and lamented his own musical anhedonia with these words: "...if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of hap...

Neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia

“…In line with this idea, the unique ability of humans to appreciate aesthetic rewards such as music relies on higher order perceptual/ cognitive analysis and encompasses learning, experience, and cultural factors that would be expected to involve cortical systems (26)(27)(28). Our results also support the notion that to derive pleasure from music, the cortical and subcortical systems must act in concert; in particular, we found the interplay between the right STG and VS to be crucial.…”

Music Perception in Dementia

“…On both computational and neuroanatomical grounds, these processes are likely to be vulnerable to the effects of neurodegenerative diseases, most notably AD and primary progressive aphasia syndromes that target peri-Sylvian cortex (progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) and logopenic aphasia (LPA): [8][9][10][11]). A substantial body of structural and functional neuroimaging work in the healthy brain and in patients with focal brain lesions has delineated distributed cortico-subcortical networks that analyze the dimensions of music [6,12,13]: these networks closely overlap the networks targeted in canonical dementia syndromes [14,15]. However, to date most studies of music in dementia have focused on the interaction of music and memory [16][17][18], preserved abilities in trained musicians developing dementia [16,19,20] and potential benefits of music more widely in dementia [21][22][23][24][25].…”

Aesthetic Experience Explained by the Affect-Space Framework

“…The act of creative production (such as a musician playing at a concert, an artist painting in a studio, or a composer at work) and its relationship to the perception and contemplation of art works are involved (Tinio, 2013). The brain activity that corresponds to aesthetic experience is another way of defining the process, although the neuroscientific understanding of aesthetic experience is in its infancy (Brattico, Bogert, & Jacobsen, 2013;Brattico & Pearce, 2013;Calvo-Merino, Jola, Glaser, & Haggard, 2008;Cela-Conde, Agnati, Huston, Mora, & Nadal, 2011;Chatterjee, 2004;Chatterjee & Vartanian, 2014;Jacobs, Renken, & Cornelissen, 2012;Thakral, Moo, & Slotnick, 2012;Trost, Ethofer, Zentner, & Vuilleumier, 2012;Vartanian & Skov, 2014;Zatorre & Salimpoor, 2013). Other authors have argued that it can refer to pure pleasure, Empirical Musicology Review Vol.…”