New Study Finds Part Of Brain Associated With Wanting To Buy Music
A new study by McGill University has found that there is a part of your brain that can indicate whether or not you want to buy music upon hearing it for the first time.
The nucleus accumbens or "reward center" of the brain acts a fool whenever a listener hears a song that they would be willing to spend money on. In fact, the amount of activity in the nucleus accumbens directly correlates to how much a person would be willing to spend on a given song.
"When people listen to a piece of music they have never heard before, activity in one brain region can reliably and consistently predict whether they will like or buy it," lead investigator Dr. Valorie Salimpoor said in an interview with Science Daily. "This is the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in forming expectations that may be rewarding."
Of course, the brain is a complex mechanism. The reward center alone is not responsible for whether or not you will buy a song. There is a lot of interaction between the nucleus accumbens, your auditory cortex (the musical part of your brain) and other areas that help with high-level functions. Taken as a whole, these interactions can help determine your willingness to spend hard earned cash on a composition.
According to the study, expectation plays a huge role in whether or not you will purchase a song. When chord progressions and music elements line up the way your brain predicts they will, the brain feels a sense of reward and you like the song more. Unexpected jarring changes are less likely to activate these areas and therefore, you are less likely to want to purchase that song.
Below is that, but in SCIENCE (taken from the text of the study):
"Our results provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first direct evidence that the intense pleasure experienced when listening to music
is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system, including both dorsal and ventral striatum. This phylogenetically ancient circuitry has evolved to reinforce basic biological behaviors with high adaptive value. However, the rewarding qualities of music listening are not obviously directly adaptive. That is, musical stimuli, similar to other aesthetic stimuli, are perceived as being rewarding by the listener, rather than exerting a direct biological or chemical
influence. Furthermore, the perception that results in a rewarding response is relatively specific to the listener, as there is large variability in musical preferences amongst individuals. Thus, through complex cognitive mechanisms, humans are able to obtain pleasure from music, a highly abstract reward consisting of just a sequence of tones unfolding over time, which is comparable to the pleasure experienced from more basic biological stimuli. One explanation for this phenomenon is that it is related to enhancement of emotions. The emotions induced by music are evoked, among other things, by temporal phenomena, such as expectations, delay, tension, resolution, prediction, surprise and anticipation."
Here is the study: https://www.zlab.mcgill.ca/docs/salimpoor_2011_nn.pdf
Here is a list of songs people were willing to pay for ranked most to least: https://www.zlab.mcgill.ca/science2013/
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