Listening To New Music Is Healthy For The Brain

Canadian scientists used some fancy scans to look at people’s brains when they listened to new music for the first time. Turns out, when they liked the music, this part of their brain that likes getting rewarded got all lit up! And the more they liked the music, the stronger the activity was in a specific area called the nucleus accumbens.

According to scientists, listening to new music activates the same area of the brain as sex, and this region interacts with the auditory cortical stores, which store sound information from previously heard music. The researchers aim to investigate how this affects people’s musical preferences and whether brain activity can account for why people are attracted to certain genres of music.