How Music Affects the Brain: What Neuroscience Says About Emotion and Thinking

Listening to a favorite song can produce a physical rush often described as "chills" — goosebumps, a faster heartbeat, a shift in mood. Neuroscientists have spent decades mapping what happens inside the brain when that occurs, using tools such as PET and fMRI scanning. The findings point to a consistent pattern: music engages the same reward circuitry that responds to food, and it also recruits memory, motor, and attention networks across the brain.

Music and the brain's reward system

A widely cited study from the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University used a combination of PET and fMRI imaging to track dopamine activity while participants listened to music that gave them chills. The researchers found that dopamine — a neurotransmitter also involved in the pleasure response to food, and more broadly linked to reward — was released both in anticipation of a musical peak and during the peak itself, according to the McGill newsroom report on the study.

The McGill team identified two related but distinct phases: an anticipation phase, which engages cognitive and motor-related brain systems involved in predicting what comes next in a piece of music, and an experience phase, which involves the limbic system, the brain's emotional center. The researchers linked this pattern to musical tension and resolution — the sense of expectation a melody builds and then releases.

A separate study summarized by the science-news outlet PsyPost went further, testing whether dopamine actually causes musical pleasure rather than simply accompanying it. In the study, 27 participants attended three separate sessions a week apart, each time receiving either levodopa (a drug that increases dopamine availability), risperidone (a drug that blocks certain dopamine receptors), or a placebo before listening to music. According to PsyPost's summary, risperidone reduced participants' ability to experience musical pleasure, while levodopa increased it and increased how much they said they would pay to hear the music again — evidence, the researchers concluded, that dopamine plays a direct, causal role rather than a merely correlated one.

Beyond pleasure: memory, movement, and mood

A 2024 review article in the journal Cureus, available via the PubMed Central (PMC) archive, surveyed research on music's effects on neuroplasticity — the brain's capacity to reorganize itself — and on specific neural circuits. The review reports that musicians, particularly those who began training before age seven, tend to have an enlarged corpus callosum, the band of fibers connecting the brain's two hemispheres, with the size of the change correlating with years of training.

The same review describes activity across several interconnected brain networks during music listening or playing: the auditory cortex and superior temporal gyrus for processing sound; the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and motor areas for rhythm and movement; the ventral striatum, nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex for emotional reward; and the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and default mode network for higher-level cognition and self-referential thought.

On memory, the review notes that musicians show denser gray matter in the left hippocampus, a brain region central to memory formation, which researchers associate with more vivid music-linked memories. It also cites evidence that music-induced dopamine release can strengthen the formation of episodic memories — memories of specific events — and that a year of aural-skills training improved how the hippocampus responded to novel sounds in one study it reviewed.

On mood, the review states that pleasurable music activates both the dopamine and, in some studies, the opioid system, and is associated with reduced anxiety, depression, and stress, along with increases in endorphins and oxytocin — effects reported as particularly pronounced during group singing. The review also notes that findings on the opioid system's role are mixed: one study tied to an opioid-blocking drug reduced physiological markers of pleasure, while another found no change in self-reported pleasure, leading the review's authors to conclude the opioid system is not the primary driver of music-evoked pleasure.

Clinical and real-world applications

The PMC review also summarizes research on music's use in clinical settings. It reports that task-specific piano and electronic drum pad training was linked to cortical reorganization in stroke patients, and that music interventions have shown benefits for mood, alertness, and quality of life in people with Parkinson's disease. For dementia and Alzheimer's disease, the review states that music therapy can trigger memory retrieval and improve mood and socialization, and it cites findings that, among participants over 75, those who played a musical instrument regularly had lower rates of dementia diagnosis over a five-year period compared with infrequent players.

The same source reports that listening to preferred music reduced pain ratings in some studies by altering activity in cortical regions, the brainstem, and the spinal cord, and that children with autism showed improved communication and brain connectivity after group music therapy. On cognition more broadly, the review notes that music training has been linked to gains in working memory, attention, verbal intelligence, and second-language acquisition, but states that it did not improve mathematical skill development in the research it surveyed.

What remains unsettled

The reviewed sources focus on correlational and small-sample experimental studies, and effects described — such as dementia risk reduction linked to playing an instrument — are drawn from observational research rather than controlled trials proving cause and effect in every case. The PMC review itself frames music-based interventions as showing "promise" rather than established treatment, particularly for conditions like Parkinson's disease and autism, where it describes benefits without claiming a cure or a universally reproduced effect.