How does a piece of music produce chills of pleasure? · Grey Matter

The sound is analysed in the auditory cortex and the temporal lobe, which track melody and harmony and build expectations about what comes next.

How does a piece of music produce chills of pleasure?

The sound is analysed in the auditory cortex and the temporal lobe, which track melody and harmony and build expectations about what comes next. In 2011 Salimpoor and colleagues measured dopamine release with PET while listeners heard music that gave them chills: dopamine rose in the caudate during the build-up before the peak, and in the nucleus accumbens at the peak itself. Music thus engages the same reward circuit of the striatum as food or money, driven by expectation and its resolution, and the medial prefrontal cortex tracks music tied to personal memories.