Effects of Listening To Music

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The first article, The rewards of music listening: Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system, discussed the neurological and neurochemical responses to listening to pleasant and unpleasant music. The experiment was composed of thirteen right-handed individuals, six males and seven females, between the ages of 19 and 23, none of which has any specialized musical training. Each participant was played 20-25 second clips of classical music and scrambled classical music. To scramble the musical clips Levitin and Menon created segments of 250-350 milliseconds and then rearranged them randomly. The result was a 20-25 second clip of noise that retained the pitches, timbres, and loudness of the original, while dismantling the musical structure it contained. Participants were then observed while listening to these clips of music in an fMRI machine. Levitin and Menon hypothesized that the nucleus accumbens would be strongly activated by classical music, and that activity in the nuclear accumbens would correlate to activation in the hypothalamus and ventral tegmental area, which are responsible for autonomic processes and dopamine release respectively. The researchers analyzed both the functional and effective connectivity found in the fMRI results. Analyzing functional connectivity is a way to determine the associations and dependency of activation between spatially remote areas in the brain. Analyzing effective connectivity enables the observation of interactions between brain regions mediated by anatomical connections. The hope of the researchers was that the results of the functional and effective connectivity analyses would support each other, demonstrating the functional and physical connections between ...

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...y can be addicted to music. Further studies are required in both the nature of behavioral addictions, as well as the directional effects of music listening on interconnected areas of the brain such as the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, and the forebrain. Though our knowledge of the effects of listening to music is limited, it supports the idea that music may be just as addicting as gambling or drugs, though hopefully not as harmful.

Works Cited
Holden, C. (2010, February 19). Behavior Addictions Debut in Proposed DSM-V.

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Kelley, A.E., Berridge, K.C., 2002. The neuroscience of natural rewards:

relevance to addictive drugs. J. Neurosci. 22 (9), 3306–3311.

Levitin, V.M. (2005). The Rewards of music listening: Response and physiological

connectivity of the mesolimbic system. NeuroImage, 175-184.

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