Did you know that you could be addicted to music?
This is less surprising to some than to others.
Last year, McGill University researchers
released a paper entitled "Anatomically Distinct
Dopamine Release During Anticipation and Experience
of Peak Emotions to Music."
The first thing these researchers did
was they took people who reported experiencing chills
during certain pieces of music, and measured different things,
like their body temperature and their pulse
and their respiration, to see whether or not
these chills were actually indicative
of an emotional arousal.
And they found that these chills really
did correspond to an emotional response.
From there, researchers took MRI brain scans of the participants
while they were listening to these pieces of music.
They found that the participants' brains released
dopamine in the same way that a cocaine addict's brain releases
dopamine in response to cocaine.
This is crazy.
This is saying that the reward system in the brain
works the same way to reward someone
to a piece of stimulating music as it does to reward a cocaine
addict for getting cocaine.
The evolutionary thought behind this
is that the more you feel good, the better you're
probably doing.
So you want to keep doing that good thing over and over
and over again, so your brain will
encourage you to do that thing.
Now, this is detrimental when applied to things like drugs.
Drugs exploit this reward system to make
you feel good for something that is really
doing bad things to your body.
But you can imagine that this reward system could
be used for good things, too.
This is one of those reasons why junk food tastes so good.
If you were a cave man trying to hunt down a woolly mammoth,
it was a really good thing for you
to feel good when you finally ate that woolly mammoth,
because that's what was going to make you go and fight off
another one.
Our bodies learned to like things like fat, like butter,
because those are the things that we
couldn't get out of sort of a gathering lifestyle.
Those were the things we really had to fight for.
However, in the current day and age,
when you can just go to the store
and buy butter, not so good for us anymore.
So with this idea of food, research
has been done to see whether or not
obesity can be linked to this sort of food addiction.
And what they found was really interesting.
Researchers found that the reward pathway connected
to food worked on a sort of Goldilocks principle.
They did a study of young girls, and showed
them a picture of a piece of cake,
and had them think about eating that cake, and how good it
would taste.
They took brain scans while the girls were doing the thinking.
Now, what they found was sort of a bimodal distribution.
On one end of the scale, if the girls
found that looking at the picture of the cake
was really rewarding in that reward system in their brain,
they found that sometimes these girls
were the ones who would, in life, tend
to overeat and become obese.
On the other hand, they found that if those girls did not
find the picture of the cake rewarding enough,
they would also tend to overeat.
If you don't get the right amount of dopamine released
from one piece of cake, well, then you
might have to eat two or three to get that same feeling.
This is why it's sort of the Goldilocks theory.
Too much and you'll overeat.
Too little and you'll overeat.
But have just the right amount of dopamine
released to that piece of cake, and you'll be just fine.
Researchers did find that there were also genetic links
between overeating and obesity.
But I sort of like that concept of having
a reward for something.
And if that reward is too great, well, then you'll
do it too often.
But if that reward is too little,
then you'll do it too often as well.
That low end of the spectrum is one of the reasons
why drug users often overdose.
After a while, your brain gets sensitized to the drugs
that you're taking, and so you have
to keep doing more and more and more
to get that same dopamine release that you
got at the beginning.
Eventually, you take too much.
And another place where taking risks like that
can hurt you, and also lead to a sort of addiction, gambling.
Another study has shown that gamblers
who are waiting for that roulette wheel to spin,
and anticipating a win, have the same sort of anticipatory
dopamine response in that reward pathway
as do the same cocaine addicts as they're
awaiting the cocaine.
Not only does that dopamine make it feel good
when you're getting that thing you want,
it also makes you want it, and it makes
you want that anticipation.
So it begs the question, what is addiction?
If you have the same brain responses to food and gambling
as a cocaine addict does to cocaine,
does that make you addicted to those things?
And is it a bad thing?
Is a music addiction something you should be worried about?
What?
Go forth.
Do science.