Must there be a research into this? If any of you guys/ladies out there really think listening to music is as good as sex, then you must be sleeping with the wrong person…

Come on, how on earth can we even compare to the two?

Mail Online Reports;

Listening to new music can boost the brain and give it a chemical ‘reward’ similar to sex, researchers have found.

Using MRI scans, Canadian scientists found that areas in the reward centre of the brain – the same part activated when we have sex or eat our favourite foods – became active when people heard a song for the first time.

The more the listener enjoyed what they were hearing, the stronger the connections were.

When people listen to a piece of music they have never heard before, activity in one brain region can reliably and consistently predict whether they will like or buy it, this is the nucleus accumbens which is involved in forming expectations that may be rewarding,’ says Dr. Valorie Salimpoor of the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, who led the study.

Participants in the study listened to 60 previously unheard music excerpts while undergoing functional resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning, providing bids of how much they were willing to spend for each item in an auction.

The researcher say their findings show exactly why we find listening to new music rewarding.

‘What makes music so emotionally powerful is the creation of expectations.

‘Activity in the nucleus accumbens is an indicator that expectations were met or surpassed, and in our study we found that the more activity we see in this brain area while people are listening to music, the more money they are willing to spend.

‘The brain activity in each participant was the same when they were listening to music that they ended up purchasing, although the pieces they chose to buy were all different,’

‘These results help us to see why people like different music – each person has their own uniquely shaped auditory cortex, which is formed based on all the sounds and music heard throughout our lives.

‘Also, the sound templates we store are likely to have previous emotional associations.’

The second important finding is that the nucleus accumbens doesn’t work alone, but interacts with the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that stores information about the sounds and music we have been exposed to.

The more a given piece was rewarding, the greater the cross-talk between these regions.

‘This is interesting because 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,’ says Dr. Robert Zatorre, researcher at The Neuro and co-director of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research.

‘The integrated activity of brain circuits involved in pattern recognition, prediction, and emotion allow us to experience music as an aesthetic or intellectual reward.’

Do you agree?