Researchers have discovered that the brain responds to music in the same way it responds to money and food, with this music resembling the effects of money and food. A study showed that listening to music unexpectedly or unpredictably sends a pleasure signal through the brain.
The reason for this lies in the fact that when we listen to music, our brains anticipate what could happen next, even when the music is new, because we have learned certain musical patterns from our experiences of listening to various types of music throughout our lives. The researchers explained that when we listen to music suddenly without expecting it, this activates the brain's reward and pleasure centers. They reached this conclusion after playing a variety of musical excerpts that ranged from pleasant to sad; when people were surprised by the music, more activity was observed in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain associated with musical pleasure. Dr. Ben Gold, the lead author of the study, stated: "This study adds new value to our understanding of how abstract stimuli like music activate pleasure centers in our brains. Our results also indicate that musical events can lead to prediction errors regarding rewards, similar to those observed when receiving tangible rewards like food or money. These signals significantly support brain learning, meaning that predictive processing may play a much larger role in understanding how the reward and pleasure centers are activated than we previously realized."
