Why Music Gives You Chills: What the Dopamine Study Found

You know the moment: a key change, a voice entering, and your skin prickles. For years scientists asked whether that shiver was merely poetic. In 2011 a team in Montreal measured it, and the answer involved a chemical most people associate with food, drugs and money.

• Salimpoor and colleagues at McGill University published the study in Nature Neuroscience in February 2011 ^[1].
• They used PET scanning with the tracer raclopride to estimate dopamine release in the striatum while people listened to music ^[1].
• Participants were screened for reliably experiencing chills and chose their own pleasurable music ^[1].
• The caudate was more involved during anticipation and the nucleus accumbens during the experience of peak emotion ^[1].

The question

The authors note that humans experience intense pleasure from stimuli such as food, psychoactive drugs and money, largely through dopamine activity in the brain’s mesolimbic system. Music is an abstract stimulus, not essential for survival, yet it can give similar pleasure ^[1]. Earlier imaging studies pointed to the ventral striatum but the role of dopamine had never been directly tested ^[1].

How they measured it

The team used positron emission tomography, or PET, with a tracer called [11C]raclopride. It competes with the brain’s own dopamine for the same receptors, so less tracer binding indicates more dopamine release ^[1]. To pin down the moment of peak pleasure, they used “chills,” also called musical frisson, a response with a clear pattern of autonomic nervous system arousal that can be verified by measuring heart rate, breathing, skin conductance and temperature ^[1].

Their own music

Preferences are personal, so participants selected their own highly pleasurable pieces. They were screened for consistently experiencing verifiable chills. Excerpts were matched so that each listener also heard another participant’s choice as a neutral comparison ^[1].

What they found

The study found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum during peak emotional arousal. A follow-up fMRI experiment with the same stimuli and listeners found a split: the caudate was more involved during anticipation, and the nucleus accumbens during the experience of the peak ^[1]. In plain terms, the brain’s reward system lights up both for the wait and for the arrival, in different places.

How the body was measured as well

The experiment did not rely on self-report alone. During the PET scans the team collected psychophysiological measurements, including heart rate, respiration rate, electrodermal skin conductance, blood-volume pulse amplitude and peripheral temperature, to verify that the autonomic nervous system differed between the pleasurable and neutral conditions ^[1]. Chills involve a clear and discrete pattern of autonomic arousal, which let the researchers pinpoint the moment of maximal pleasure and compare it with dopamine binding ^[1].

The paper was received on October 7, 2010, accepted on November 25, 2010 and published online on January 9, 2011, by authors at McGill’s Montreal Neurological Institute and its related music and sound research laboratories ^[1]. The authors note that humans get pleasure from abstract stimuli such as music and art that are not essential to survival and cannot be considered secondary or conditioned reinforcers, which is part of what made the dopamine result notable ^[1].

Reading it carefully

• The group was screened. These were people who reliably get chills, not a random sample.
• Chills are a marker, not the whole of enjoyment. Pleasure without chills is common.
• This is one study. It established a link; it did not explain every musical experience.

Questions readers ask

Does music really release dopamine?

A 2011 Nature Neuroscience study found dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional moments of music, measured with PET scanning ^[1].

What is the difference between anticipation and peak pleasure in the brain?

The study found the caudate more involved during anticipation and the nucleus accumbens during the experience of peak emotion ^[1].