2 results
15 - The Reward of Musical Emotions and Expectations
- from Part II - Applications
- Edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montréal, Carol M. Worthman, Emory University, Atlanta, Shinobu Kitayama, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Robert Lemelson, University of California, Los Angeles, Constance A. Cummings
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- Book:
- Culture, Mind, and Brain
- Published online:
- 18 September 2020
- Print publication:
- 24 September 2020, pp 402-415
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Summary
Music exists in all cultures and appears to elicit intense emotions and pleasure in the vast majority of people. Recent scientific advances have linked the pleasure of music listening to biological mechanisms associated with rewarding or reinforcing stimuli, including the activation of the brain’s reward system. Specifically, we and others have shown that the neurotransmitter dopamine is central to this phenomenon, and that it engages one subregion of the reward system in anticipation of pleasurable musical events and another during its realization. This dissociation implies that musical pleasure operates via some predictive mechanism that creates expectations, which the music then either fulfills or not. Accordingly, a growing body of evidence highlights the prevalence of prediction-based neural processing and its importance for learning about and adapting to one’s environment. Drawing on these findings and on related research into the optimization of learning, we propose that musical structures recruit neural systems of reward and emotion by evoking sufficiently uncertain expectations to build anticipation, and sufficiently surprising events to foster learning, reward, and pleasure. We explore the role that musical experience and culture play in engendering expectations, and offer suggestions for future research into the neuroscience of musical aesthetics and reward.
20 - Processing of Olfactory Affective Information: Contribution of Functional Imaging Studies
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- By Robert J. Zatorre, Montréal Neurological Institute, McGill University, 3801 University Street, Montréal, QC Canada
- Edited by Catherine Rouby, Université Lyon I, Benoist Schaal, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, Danièle Dubois, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, Rémi Gervais, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, A. Holley, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
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- Book:
- Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition
- Published online:
- 21 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 28 October 2002, pp 324-334
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Summary
A central concern in contemporary cognitive neuroscience is how stimulus information is represented in the human central nervous system. One approach to this issue is to examine the neural correlates of different types of stimuli in different modalities to determine the functional organization of distinct cortical and/or subcortical pathways associated with particular types of stimulus features. This approach has proved particularly powerful for understanding how visual processes are organized, for example. Much less is currently known about how the brain encodes olfactory sensory information. Despite progress in understanding the basic mechanisms of coding at the receptor level (Duchamp-Viret, Chaput, and Duchamp, 1999), cortical processing of odor quality remains largely unknown, especially in the human brain. One property of the chemical senses that differentiates them from other modalities is their strong hedonic association. Unlike visual and auditory stimuli, odors and tastes often result in strong affective reactions. That aspect of odor processing raises interesting questions about the neural substrates that account for the salient hedonic value of odors.
In the past decade, cognitive neuroscientists have benefited enormously from the development of functional neuroimaging, which allows noninvasive exploration of the brain. Those techniques measure changes in hemodynamic responses as functions of stimulus or task demands, thus permitting assessments of the neural activities associated with a wide variety of cognitive and perceptual processes. Neuroimaging complements more conventional approaches such as neurophysiological studies and lesioning studies of behavior, which continue to be of considerable importance in understanding brain–behavior relationships.
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