Researchers at McGill University in Montreal have mapped the brain's response to music, showing that listening to music stimulates the same neural clusters that react to sex, food and drugs, the Ottawa Citizen reports.
According Robert Zatorre and his team, the neurological response to music resembles the "systems of reward and emotion" that are prompted by food and sex (and artificially recreated by drugs). "This is quite remarkable," he wrote in an academic paper," because music is [not] strictly necessary for biological survival or reproduction."
The finding, part of a series of investigations into the neurological basis of music, reinforces the idea that musical appreciation is a basic human function, Zatorre told the Citizen. "The vast majority of people with no musical training can sing a song, and stil recognize a tune when it has been altered by a different key, instrument or rhythm," he said. "That seems to be innate, something our brains are wired to do."
— Ben Mattison
"A
song in your head: Brainwaves"
Paul McKay - The Ottawa Citizen -
18 November 2002
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