Might you be one of the many people who still wonder why human beings love music so much? But, have you also been asking yourself what the reason behind all this is?
Researchers from the McGill University based in Canada have also been asking the same question and looking for an answer for years now. The Journal of Neuroscience recently published their findings. The researcher believes that they now know what takes place in a human’s brain when listening to the music they adore and love.
An INVERSE report stated that Robert Zatorre and Ernesto Herrero established, in a past study, a link between a part of the brain’s reward system (known as the striatum) and a person who was listening to the music they loved. Mr. Zatorre told INVERSE that what they found was interesting because that area is usually linked to the pleasure that comes from survival.
The Striatum Response
Zatorre said that for over 60 years now, people have that if they give a starving rat food and its brain activity is gauged, it’ll have a very strong striatum response because of the satisfying substance it needed to survive.
The pleasure that the rat feels comes from dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter that is released by the striatum when the rat consumes the food it needs to survive. Mr. Zatorre further elaborated that the striatum exists to react to the body’s biological stimuli. For example, it helps one identify if they warm and need to get cool or if they are too cold and need to get warm. He continued to say that the striatum reacts to both vitality and sexual stimulation as well.
Nevertheless, music isn’t one of those things that humans traditionally need to survive. So the researchers showed the link between the striatum and music, although they still wanted to prove this relationship.
