When we're in the car, at a concert or even sitting on our sofa and one of our favorite songs is played, it's the moment that flood our system with pleasurable emotions, joyful memories, and even sending a shiver or "chill" down our spine. About half of people get chills when listening to music.
Neuroscientists based in France have now used EEG to link chills to multiple brain regions involved in activating reward and pleasure systems. The new study was published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
Researchers at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté EEG-scanned the brains of 18 participants who regularly experience chills when listening to their favorite musical pieces. In a questionnaire, they were asked to indicate when they experienced chills, and rate their degree of pleasure from them.
When the participants experienced a chill, the researchers saw specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex (a region involved in emotional processing), the supplementary motor area (a mid-brain region involved in movement control) and the right temporal lobe (a region on the right side of the brain involved in auditory processing and musical appreciation).
These regions work together to process music, trigger the brain's reward systems, and release dopamine — a "feel-good" hormone and neurotransmitter.
"The fact that we can measure this phenomenon with EEG brings opportunities for study in other contexts," said lead author Thibault Chabin in a report published on the journal's website.
EEG is a non-invasive, highly accurate technique that scans for electrical currents caused by brain activity using sensors placed across the surface of the scalp. When experiencing musical chills, low frequency electrical signals called "theta activity" — a type of activity associated with successful memory performance in the context of high rewards and musical appreciation — either increase or decrease in the brain regions that are involved in musical processing.
"Contrary to heavy neuroimaging techniques such as PET scan or fMRI, classic EEG can be transported outside of the lab," said Chabin.
