Music!
Music is powerful. All of us have felt it and all of us know it. Especially that ecstatic sensation when we hear our favorite songs.
Apparently, there is an organic element to this feeling. So declares a team of researchers from the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in “Cortical Patterns of Pleasurable Musical Chills Revealed by High-Density EEG” published recently in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
The scientists discovered specific electrical activity in the orbitofrontal cortex when music lovers experience a “chill.” That’s a region involved with emotional processing. Plus the electrical activity in the areas of the brain that handle auditory processing and musical appreciation, and you get the aforementioned frigid feeling, helped considerably by the release of the “feel good” hormone, dopamine.
Said lead author, Dr. Thibault Chabin:
The fact that we can measure this phenomenon with EEG brings opportunities for study in other contexts, in scenarios that are more natural and within groups. This represents a good perspective for musical emotion research.”
Musical emotion!
Explained Chabin:
What is most intriguing is that music seems to have no biological benefit to us. However, the implication of dopamine and of the reward system in processing of musical pleasure suggests an ancestral function for music.”
Who knows what that is?
And neuroscientists in Canada, also recently, found that music triggers the same reward center in the brain as does alcohol and cocaine (and neuronal pathways for stimuli such as food and sex)! Also involving dopamine! And involving Francophone researchers studying the orbitofrontal cortex, as in the other study: “Unraveling the Temporal Dynamics of Reward Signals in Music-Induced Pleasure,” in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Said senior author Dr. Robert Zatorre:
Music consists of a series of sounds that when considered alone have no inherent value, but when arranged together through patterns over time can act as a reward. The integrated activity of brain circuits involved in pattern recognition, prediction, and emotion allow us to experience music as an aesthetic or intellectual reward.”
You have to wonder why we are created that way.
I have a suspicion. Grounded in the Psalms. We were created with music to sing the praises of our great God.
I will give thanks to Yahweh with all my heart; I will tell of all Your wonders.
I will be glad and rejoice in You; I will sing praise to Your name, Most High.
Psalms 9:1–2
My heart will shout with joy in Your deliverance.
I will sing to Yahweh, because He has rendered [good] to me.
Psalms 13:5–6
Shout for joy, righteous ones, in Yahweh; to the upright, praise is fitting.
Give thanks to Yahweh with the lyre;
with a ten-stringed instrument, make music to Him.
Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully with gladness.
For upright is the word of Yahweh, and all His doings [are] in faithfulness.
He loves righteousness and justice; the lovingkindness of Yahweh, it fills the earth.
Psalms 33:1–5
Sing praise to God, sing praise; sing praise to our King, sing praises.
For King of all the earth is God; sing praise with understanding.
Psalms 47:6–7
Shout triumphantly to God, all the earth;
sing praises to the glory of His name; make glorious His praise.
Say to God, “How awesome [are] Your deeds! …
All the earth will bow deeply to/worship You,
and will sing praises to You;
they will sing praises to Your name.”
Psalms 66:1–4
And thus celebrate the Kingship of God over the cosmos, one day soon to be manifest in the Kingdom of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.
SOURCES:
Frontiers in Neuroscience; Journal of Neuroscience; Study Finds
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.