Sex, dopamine, and rock 'n roll?

A neurotransmitter that makes the experience of sex, drugs, and food pleasurable is also triggered by listening to music. The "experience of pleasure while listening to music is associated with dopamine release." So finds a study published in the 9 January issue of Nature Neuroscience, "Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music."

From an initial pool of 217 participants, researchers from McGill University in Canada selected 8 subjects who displayed consistent "arousal" responses to music. During several listening sessions, their brains were scanned using PET and fMRI techniques. The study is one in a growing literature on the neurophysiology of musical frisson. But do we like music simply because it makes us feel good?

The authors write,

Most people agree that music is an especially potent pleasurable stimulus that is frequently used to affect emotional states. It has been empirically demonstrated that music can effectively elicit highly pleasurable emotional responses and previous neuroimaging studies have implicated emotion and reward circuits of the brain during pleasurable music listening particularly the ventral striatum, suggesting the possible involvement of dopaminergic mechanisms. However, the role of dopamine has never been directly tested. . . .

The study's demonstration of a dopamine link is remarkable, but it is also a temptation to reductionism, a cheap high to which many a science writer cannot say no. The Associated Press' coverage, circulating under the title, "Love music? Thank a substance in your brain," begins, "Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a new study says."

Of course, even if they were to be corroborated, such results would not explain why you love music. In what was apparently the first scientific study of aesthetic frisson, "Thrills in response to music and other stimuli" (Physiological Psychology, 1980), A. Goldstein looked at American samples and found that only about half of the population were personally acquainted with the phenomenon. Experimental evidence suggests that for those who do experience "chills," the feelings are short lived. They tend to accompany moments of transition in music, such as harmonic modulations and crescendos.

What should raise even more serious philosophical scruples is the identification of the emotions of music with feelings of pleasure in the listener. More than a hint of this lurks in the language of the McGill article:

Pleasure is a subjective phenomenon that is difficult to assess objectively. However, physiological changes occur during moments of extreme pleasure, which can be used to index pleasurable states in response to music. We used the 'chills' or 'musical frisson' response, a well-established marker of peak emotional responses to music. Chills involve a clear and discrete pattern of autonomic nervous system (ANS) arousal, which allows for objective verification through psychophysiological measurements. Thus, the chills response can be used to objectively index pleasure, a subjective phenomenon that would otherwise be difficult to operationalize, and allows us to pinpoint the precise time of maximal pleasure.

Now surely it must be that one of the things we love about music is our "emotional response" to it; more precisely, our enjoyment of musical expressions of emotional states. Musical objects have what the philosopher Peter Kivy calls "expressive content." Somehow, by means that have yet to be explained, they can exhibit not just "thrills" but joy, mirth, tenderness, resolve, longing, grief, anxiety, fear, rage, bewilderment, serenity. And yet it does not seem to be the case that: (1) our enjoyment of these various expressions is the same thing as the enjoyment of some uniform feeling--call it pleasure--that they stir "inside" us; or even that (2) our enjoyment of expressive content in music is the enjoyment of corresponding, distinctive emotions inside us--musical expressions of grief that cause feelings of grief, expressions of rage that enrage us, expressions of fear that scare us, and so forth; still less that (3) our enjoyment of expressive content typically is connected to the tingling spines or erect hairs of the frisson.

There must be more to the savoring of sonority than the delivery of a chemical fix. And I say this as a stone-cold junkie.