Music & Sex - Part Five: It's In Your Head
By: Adam Bunch
February 12, 2010
Go back to Part Four: We'd Actually Rather You Didn't Do It In The Road here.
The Montreal Neurological Institute is an old, stone building in the shadow of the mountain at the heart of the city, tucked into a dead-end street on the campus of McGill University. It was founded by Wilder Penfield—one of the world's first great pioneering neurosurgeons—and it was here that he revolutionized his field, discovering surgical methods for the treatment of epilepsy. Inside, it has the feel of a hospital, with institutionally-coloured tiled floors dotted with medical supply carts and walls adorned with hand sanitizing stations.
On the second floor, you'll find the office of Dr. Robert Zatorre. He's a neuroscientist on the cutting edge of research into the way music affects the brain. And it was while working at the MNI that he and a postdoctoral fellow at the time, Anne Blood, started to think about the way in which we enjoy listening to songs. People frequently describe it as a very pleasurable experience, but a sense of pleasure is something that's thought to have developed evolutionarily as a way to encourage behaviours that are required for life to exist-things like eating and drinking and sex.
"We thought, ‘Well music isn't like any of those things,'" Dr. Zatorre explains. "It doesn't lead directly to survival of either the individual organism or the species. You can live without it. It's not essential for survival... [It] seemed to be this abstract phenomenon—unlike these other biologically-driven kinds of effects—but on the other hand it gives people a lot of pleasure... It leaves kind of a mysterious question out there as to why does music have these properties. It something we're actively exploring and trying to understand."
In order to further that understanding, Zatorre and Blood performed a landmark study on the way in which we enjoy listening to music. By playing recordings to subjects and measuring physical indicators of their resulting pleasure, the researchers established that music did indeed stimulate the brain in a way that had previously only been proven in cases of activities required for survival.
The neurological mechanisms involved in the process are incredibly complex and far from fully understood, but Dr. Zatorre highlights one factor which he finds particularly relevant.
"Music has some interesting properties to it," he says. "Among them are things like changes in sounds over time that lead you to anticipate that some event will occur. I think this is universal in all styles of music. If you have music that is completely unpredictable—as in truly random sounds—it becomes very boring very quickly because you can't anticipate what's going to happen from one moment to the next... they have no relation to each other and therefore it's uninteresting. Conversely, if you have music that is highly, highly predictable, it also is quite boring. So if you think of children's tunes, they tend to be like that—extremely simplistic—and a lot of pop music actually is incredibly repetitive and boring for that reason: because it's always the same chords repeated over and over and over and over.
"Usually," he continues, "in all genres of music, the music that is most valuable is the one that plays around a little with those expectations... [that] sets up certain expectations and sometimes rewards you for knowing what's coming next and sometimes gives you a different answer to the one you were expecting... I think the interplay between expectation and the realization of expectation is a huge component of why music is rewarding."
He has seen that play out in the lab. Some of the same parts of the brain that are involved in reward response are stimulated in what's called "the anticipatory phase", leading up to the moment of maximum pleasure. Dr. Zatorre has been able to record the physical evidence of pleasure occurring a few seconds before part of a song that a subject finds particularly simulating. Anticipation becomes part of the pleasure.
And while he's quick to stress that the ways in which music and sex affect the brain aren't identical—though his findings have often been misinterpreted that way in the press—he does see very interesting similarities.
"Without stretching the analogy too too much," he says, "I think a huge part of sex is that as well: the anticipation. It's not just the orgasm, there's a lot going on before you get there... It could be years... You have the goal of having sex with someone that you have met and you find very attractive but that might be a very long-term goal and there might be a lot of pleasure associated with the interactions with that person that might eventually lead up to that goal. They might not, but as long as you think that they might it's going to be pleasurable.
"That's part of what makes humans tick: you can delay the reward for a very, very long time and engage in all kinds of behaviours that are going to lead to that reward eventually. The anticipation associated with those behaviours can in itself be rewarding."
A lot of the pleasure we get from music, then, comes from the same kind of cognitive processes that our sexual pleasure does. It ‘s a kind of aural foreplay. We come into a listening experience—like a sexual one—with our own personal likes and dislikes that the right piece of music will interact with, using an arsenal of pitches, rhythms, tempos and timbers to (quite literally) stimulate your pleasure centres. It builds anticipation, teases and titillates, rewards and climaxes.
So, in the end, it's no wonder that music and sex are so intrinsically linked in our lives; the connections and similarities are built right into the neurons of our brain.
The details of those links are something that neuroscientists like Dr. Zatorre are still just beginning to understand—and may never completely uncover. But that's pretty much par for the course when it comes to music and sex. They have a relationship as complex as it is powerful—one that stretches so far back into our prehistory that we can't ever be sure how it started. It has been the catalyst for massive social change, and redirected government policies. It has gotten people tortured and exiled. It's turned them into historical icons and bedroom pin-ups. It's helped people fall in and out of love and, of course, gotten them laid.
How could ever hope to fully wrap your head around all that?
You can find full transcripts of the interviews with Pamela Des Barres, Har Mar Superstar, Kids On TV's John Caffery and Robert Zatorre, along with more features from SoundProof's Sex Week here.
