Medical Imaging Reveals Why Music Affects People So Strongly

There are few art forms that affect people emotionally and physically as much as music and a recent study used multiple medical imaging technologies to find out why.

The first line of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night described music as the “food of love” but whilst the power of music can be fairly easily intuited, it is far more difficult to ascertain exactlyhow it affects people.

The answer might be found in a study by a team from the University of Turku in Finland, published in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

Through the use of positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the team led by Vesa Putkinen noted that the reaction engages the same hedonic systems of the brain as delicious food and positive social interactions, which triggers a neurochemical reaction to reward and reinforce that behaviour.

The neurochemical reactions in similar areas may explain why when people listen to music they like, they can get strong physical reactions such as accumulating goosebumps, feeling chills, and crying tears of joy.

As it turns out, Mr Shakespeare may have been right to compare music to food; certainly, they affect the pleasure circuitry of the brain in a similar way according to this study.

The results, particularly those found using the PET scan, found a direct connection between music and the brain’s opioid system, and this discovery could have greater implications for treatment and pain relief.

The opioid system plays a role not only in pleasure sensations but also in pain relief, which means potentially that listening to music one enjoys could affect the sensation of pain.

There have been previous studies in that field but they have focused on distraction, stress relief and more general dopamine regulation, rather than the specific neurochemical processes that make music so powerful.

By contrast, medical imaging allowed researchers to see the specific processes involved.