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Chills, Bets, and Dopamine

During the past decade, research in cognitive neuroscience has tried to understand how the organized acoustic information we call music is decoded in the brain as pleasant and rewarding stimulus. In this chapter, the authors retrace part of this intriguing journey: from the first positron emission tomography study revealing the association between the mesolimbic system and musical pleasure to the recent pharmacological interventions showing that dopamine causally mediates the subjectively rewarding experience elicited by music. The dopamine-dependent hedonic and motivational responses to music may depend on the modulations of several neural mechanisms related not only to emotion, but also to attention and memory. Musical reward arises therefore as a complex set of processes which constitute a special access key to the study of human cognition.