The rewards of music listening: Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system

By Vinod Menon, Daniel J. Levitin. NeuroImage, 2005

1,005 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although the neural underpinnings of music cognition have been widely studied in the last 5 years, relatively little is known about the neuroscience underlying emotional reactions that music induces in listeners. Many people spend a significant amount of time listening to music, and its emotional power is assumed but not well understood. Here, we use functional and effective connectivity analyses to show for the first time that listening to music strongly modulates activity in a network of mesolimbic structures involved in reward processing including the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), as well as the hypothalamus and insula, which are thought to be involved in regulating autonomic and physiological responses to rewarding and emotional stimuli. Responses in the NAc and the VTA were strongly correlated pointing to an association between dopamine release and NAc response to music. Responses in the NAc and the hypothalamus were also strongly correlated across subjects, suggesting a mechanism by which listening to pleasant music evokes physiological reactions. Effective connectivity confirmed these findings, and showed significant VTA-mediated interaction of the NAc with the hypothalamus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex. The enhanced functional and effective connectivity between brain regions mediating reward, autonomic, and cognitive processing provides insight into understanding why listening to music is one of the most rewarding and pleasurable human experiences.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23bb0c899dd1ac70745c16c14b9c342b19868107

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Citations in the corpus

Synchrony as an Adaptive Mechanism for Large-Scale Human Social Bonding (2016, positive): “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging has provided evidence that areas of the brain with large numbers of opioid receptors that are involved in positive reinforcement (such as the nucleus accumbens) are active during passive listening to music (Brown et al. 2004; Menon & Levitin 2005; Koelsch 2014).”
Naturalizing aesthetics: Brain areas for aesthetic appraisal across sensory modalities (2011, neutral): “Four of the six studies of musical pleasantness did (Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Brown et al., 2004; Koelsch et al., 2006; Menon and Levitin, 2005), while only one of the five studies of visual artworks did (Di Dio Table 1 Principal ALE foci for the conjunction analyses.”
Effects of music therapy on depression compared with psychotherapy (2010, background): “This beneficial effect has been in part explained by the response to music and the physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system, which provokes pleasurable experiences (Menon & Levitin, 2005).”
Emotions evoked by the sound of music: characterization, classification, and measurement. (2008, background): “Moreover, tentative evidence suggests that brain regions activated by emotional music are similar to those that are activated by strong rewards such as sex, food, and drugs of abuse (e.g., Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Menon & Levitin, 2005 ).”
Listening to sad music in adverse situations: How music selection strategies relate to self-regulatory goals, listening effects, and mood enhancement (2015, background): “Listening to self-identified pleasant music results in brain activity in regions associated with reward and displeasure inhibition (Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Menon & Levitin, 2005; Schubert, 1996).”
Dissociable Intrinsic Connectivity Networks for Salience Processing and Executive Control (2007, background): “Most remaining nodes in the salience network are subcortical sites for emotion, homeostatic regulation, and reward (Ongur and Price, 2000; Menon and Levitin, 2005).”
Hedonic Hotspots: Generating Sensory Pleasure in the Brain (2007, positive): “Current evidence suggests the nucleus accumbens participates in many rewards for people and animals, including sex, music, drugs, social rewards, humor, winning money, and so on (Carelli and Wightman, 2004; Gottfried, Chapter 8, this book; Insel and Fernald, 2004; Kalivas and Volkow, 2005; Knutson a”
Modulation of aesthetic value by semantic context: An fMRI study (2009, neutral): “, 2003b), correlated with modulated activity (Blood et al., 1999; Blood and Zatorre, 2001; Brown et al., 2004; Menon and Levitin, 2005; Koelsch et al., 2006) and vision (Aharon et al.”
The Reward Circuit: Linking Primate Anatomy and Human Imaging (2010, background): “…the notion that striatal activation does not depend on sensory modality (Aharon et al , 2001; Anderson et al , 2003; Delgado et al , 2000; Elliott et al , 2000b; Gottfried et al , 2002; Knutson et al , 2000; Menon and Levitin, 2005; Mobbs et al , 2003; O’Doherty et al , 2001; Rolls et al , 2003).”
Individual Differences in Music Reward Experiences (2013, background): “…as monetary reward)—to be a higher-order pleasure that may require further or different processing than more basic rewards (e.g., sex and food), even though they may share similar brain mechanisms (Berridge & Kringelbach, 2008; Blood & Zatorre, 2001; Menon & Levitin, 2005; Salimpoor et al., 2011).”
Affective neuroscience of pleasure: reward in humans and animals (2008, background): “…Cardinal et al. 2002; Everitt and Robbins 2005; Kringelbach 2004, 2005; Kringelbach and Berridge 2008; Kringelbach et al. 2004; Levine et al. 2003; Menon and Levitin 2005; O'Doherty et al. 2002; Pelchat et al. 2004; Rolls 2005; Schultz 2006; Small et al. 2001; Volkow et al. 2002; Wang et al.…”