The Pleasure Derived from Music: Chills, Thrills, and Dopamine

Anyone who has read Potspoon! for any length of time can attest that I am kind of a music junkie. I love making it, dancing to it, watching it, listening to it. Watching someone passionately sing their heart out is one of the most spiritual (to me) moments that one can be a part of. The chills that you get when the music does what it is supposed to is one of my favorite experiences. Making music is a very intimate thing for a lot of people and when everything just "clicks" between a group of musicians, the air feels alive with static.

That feeling, it appears, is in part due to the dopamine being released in anticipation of and during a pleasurable experience. It's like a little reward from your brain. In a study done by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, responses were measured by the "chill" factor, skin conductance, breathing, heart rate, and temperature. These were all correlated to music pleasurability ratings. They even did brain imaging in real time to see how the brain responds to peaks and whether it coincided to the peaks shown physically. The findings were pretty outstanding in that they could see baseline neutral readings and peaks all in synch with music.

The fact that dopamine is released for something abstract like music may prove to be beneficial. Dopamine is usually a reward for food, sex, drugs, and other such tangibles. This is an amazing step proving that non-tangible experiences can still be rewarded by our body. It sort of reminds me of  A Clockwork Orange and how Adam was calmed and soothed (or went crazy and froze depending on your take) when Beethoven was played. Ahhh.... music!

You can read more about the study and the brain analyses and imaging they did at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital website.

Fuzzy Picture of Music Equipment teefed from friends Facebook page.

 

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Amoeba Song

Anyone who follows Potspoon! on Facebook knows that I randomly post things pertaining to science, but that are not really post worthy like science songs, animal guessing games, science jokes and more. Well this video is short enough and silly enough that I deemed it worthy of posting here. It is the Amoeba Song by the Adolescents. Science humor is awsome.

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Reggae Riddims

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Heard an interesting song today. Special audio only post because I love you guys so much and I don't want to torture you with bad videos today. Intro/outro music is King Tubby and Harry Mudie, Jungle Dub Walk. Here is a link to the radio station I mention, WSTX. Enjoy!

You can find King Tubby music here.

You can find Cocoa Tea music here.

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Sound of eBay

To those of us "in-the-know" there is a group of individuals behind two "hacker-artists" that creates songs using eBay arbitrary information. These guys are responsible for GWEI (Google Will Eat Itself), an exhibit that has been seen in galleries world wide. While it does seem strange, it's always interesting to see what your song will sound like. I did mine in June and it is very Euro-tech. Makes me want to play 16-bit racing games. Apparently mine is quite boring because I don't buy much. If you want to do your own, just because curiosity got the best of you, go to the Sound of eBay website. Be wary, however, the pixilations on the Sound of eBay website are lewd when viewed from afar. Up close they look like nothing. If your hubs is a ways behind you though, he will see it as quite a bit scandalous. Those crazy artist types have a wicked sense of humor. The link to my personal eBay song, however, is just an mP3 link so nothing scary to see. The whole piece (as it is "art") is called The Sound of eBay, Teletext porn, Human Needs.... and the corresponding images have numbers.

Please do not get mad at me if you click the link to the main site and are offended. It is art and art has the tendency to push envelopes. I just thought the technology behind this was amusing. The other 2 links are fine ("mine" and "GWEI").

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