Investigating the dynamics of the brain response to music: A central role of the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens

Mueller, Karsten; Fritz, Thomas Hans; Mildner, Toralf; Richter, M.; Schulze, Katrin; Lepsien, Jöran; Schroeter, Matthias L.; Möller, Harald E.

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.05.006

Cited by 41 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Indeed, in a prior study, it was shown that the degree of activity in the right NAcc was the best predictor of the bid amount participants were willing to spend to purchase previously unheard music (17). Moreover, the NAcc is consistently recruited as a function of increasing music-induced pleasure (24) and reaches its maximum activity during peak pleasure (chills) (12). In the current study, we observed a reduced activation in the NAcc in participants who subjectively reported music listening as not being a pleasurable experience.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia

Martínez‐Molina

Mas‐Herrero

Rodrı́guez-Fornells

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

159

181

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Although music is ubiquitous in human societies, there are some people for whom music holds no reward value despite normal perceptual ability and preserved reward-related responses in other domains. The study of these individuals with specific musical anhedonia may be crucial to understand better the neural correlates underlying musical reward. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that musically induced pleasure may arise from the interaction between auditory cortical networks and mesolimbic reward networks. If such interaction is critical for music-induced pleasure to emerge, then those individuals who do not experience it should show alterations in the cortical-mesolimbic response. In the current study, we addressed this question using fMRI in three groups of 15 participants, each with different sensitivity to music reward. We demonstrate that the music anhedonic participants showed selective reduction of activity for music in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), but normal activation levels for a monetary gambling task. Furthermore, this group also exhibited decreased functional connectivity between the right auditory cortex and ventral striatum (including the NAcc). In contrast, individuals with greater than average response to music showed enhanced connectivity between these structures. Thus, our results suggest that specific musical anhedonia may be associated with a reduction in the interplay between the auditory cortex and the subcortical reward network, indicating a pivotal role of this interaction for the enjoyment of music.Without music, life would be a mistake.Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols T his quote highlights the importance of music for the life of most people. Indeed, although music is not a primary reward (such as food or sex), it is reckoned as one of the most important sources of pleasure in life. Furthermore, music has been present in human societies since prehistory (1), and most of the current literature on music psychology has described it as a universal reward for human beings (2). Its ubiquity and antiquity prove the importance of music in our society (3).Paradoxically, not everybody loves music: A small percentage of healthy individuals do not find music pleasurable, a phenomenon known as specific musical anhedonia (4). A detailed study on this population revealed that this phenomenon cannot be explained by perceptual problems [e.g., hearing impairment or specific impairment in perceptual capabilities, a condition known as amusia (5)] or by general anhedonia (lack of pleasure for all types of rewarding stimuli). When listening to music rated as pleasant by others, people with specific musical anhedonia showed a reduced emotional arousal as indexed by autonomic nervous system activity [in particular, skin conductance response (SCR) and heart rate measurements] compared with people having standard or high sensitivity to music. Notably, they showed normal responses to other types of reward [e.g., money (4)]. Therefore, individuals with specific musical anhedonia represent an idea...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia

Martínez‐Molina

Mas‐Herrero

Rodrı́guez-Fornells

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

159

181

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“…To this end, we adopted fMRI data from our previous experiment 9 . Twenty-three healthy participants were scanned using a 3 T MR system while listening to 30-s excerpts from instrumental music (e.g., classical piano concerto, big band swing).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After each excerpt, participants rated the perceived pleasantness (1 = very pleasant, 2 = pleasant, 3 = unpleasant, 4 = very unpleasant) during a silence period of 6 s. An fMRI volume covering the ventral half of the brain was acquired every second. The original design of the experiment manipulated stimuli in a 2 × 2 factorial design of play direction (forward vs. backward) and harmony (consonant vs. dissonant) 9 . In the present study, we only focused on the contrast between the original music (i.e., “consonant”) and its dissonant counterpart (i.e., “dissonant”).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The reason was that a participant’s rating of dissonant music alone is a mixture of dislike of dissonance and one’s musical preference that is irrelevant to harmony. Because we used the same set of music for all participants 9 , it is possible that one participant might have liked certain musical excerpt (in its original form) more than another participant, and it was actually true in the real data strongly motivating use of this differential index (see Results). Therefore, we used the difference in subjective rating of unpleasantness (“rating contrast”) as an index of how much a person dislikes dissonant harmony while controlling nuisance variability in personal musical preference that is not related to harmony.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Dissonance encoding in human inferior colliculus covaries with individual differences in dislike of dissonant music

Kim

Lepsien

Fritz

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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Harmony is one of the most fundamental elements of music that evokes emotional response. The inferior colliculus (IC) has been known to detect poor agreement of harmonics of sound, that is, dissonance. Electrophysiological evidence has implicated a relationship between a sustained auditory response mainly from the brainstem and unpleasant emotion induced by dissonant harmony. Interestingly, an individual’s dislike of dissonant harmony of an individual correlated with a reduced sustained auditory response. In the current paper, we report novel evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for such a relationship between individual variability in dislike of dissonance and the IC activation. Furthermore, for the first time, we show how dissonant harmony modulates functional connectivity of the IC and its association with behaviourally reported unpleasantness. The current findings support important contributions of low level auditory processing and corticofugal interaction in musical harmony preference.

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“…The results further support the view that the ventral striatum, i.e., presumably the nucleus accumbens, is deeply involved in processing music-evoked emotions and reduces its connectivity to other areas. This does not mean a reduced activation, but rather acting on a different time scale (Mueller et al, 2015). In fact, the significantly reduced self-inhibition as well as the changed hemodynamic parameter of the right ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens indicate an increased level of activation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listening to Rhythmic Music Reduces Connectivity within the Basal Ganglia and the Reward System

2017

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Music can trigger emotional responses in a more direct way than any other stimulus. In particular, music-evoked pleasure involves brain networks that are part of the reward system. Furthermore, rhythmic music stimulates the basal ganglia and may trigger involuntary movements to the beat. In the present study, we created a continuously playing rhythmic, dance floor-like composition where the ambient noise from the MR scanner was incorporated as an additional instrument of rhythm. By treating this continuous stimulation paradigm as a variant of resting-state, the data was analyzed with stochastic dynamic causal modeling (sDCM), which was used for exploring functional dependencies and interactions between core areas of auditory perception, rhythm processing, and reward processing. The sDCM model was a fully connected model with the following areas: auditory cortex, putamen/pallidum, and ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens of both hemispheres. The resulting estimated parameters were compared to ordinary resting-state data, without an additional continuous stimulation. Besides reduced connectivity within the basal ganglia, the results indicated a reduced functional connectivity of the reward system, namely the right ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens from and to the basal ganglia and auditory network while listening to rhythmic music. In addition, the right ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens demonstrated also a change in its hemodynamic parameter, reflecting an increased level of activation. These converging results may indicate that the dopaminergic reward system reduces its functional connectivity and relinquishing its constraints on other areas when we listen to rhythmic music.

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Investigating the dynamics of the brain response to music: A central role of the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens

Cited by 41 publications

References 32 publications

Neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia

Neural correlates of specific musical anhedonia

Dissonance encoding in human inferior colliculus covaries with individual differences in dislike of dissonant music

Listening to Rhythmic Music Reduces Connectivity within the Basal Ganglia and the Reward System

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