Researchers at McGill University in Montreal asked people who got chills from a favorite piece of music to listen while lying in a PET scanner, measuring dopamine released into the striatum, the brain's reward hub, at the exact moments the music became most moving.
PET scans showed dopamine released in the striatum, the reward system tied to food and drugs, at peak emotion. Follow-up MRI split the timing in two: the caudate was more active in the anticipation just before a favorite passage, the nucleus accumbens at the peak of the chills.
That split meant the brain treats the wait for a beloved moment in a song differently from the moment itself, the same two-stage pattern seen with more tangible rewards. The finding helped explain why music, which carries no nutrients and no direct survival value, still ranks among the most consistently rewarding experiences across human cultures, though the study looked only at people who already loved the music chosen.
Read the original study
Salimpoor et al., Nature Neuroscience, 2011 · doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726
A song, and the brain's own reward chemistry.
Source
- Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257–62. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726