Think your playlist perfectly represents your unique personality? Think again.
Neuroscientists have discovered they can actually manipulate how much you enjoy your favorite songs with a simple, non-invasive brain stimulation technique.
In groundbreaking research from McGill University, scientists successfully increased and decreased music enjoyment and purchasing motivation by targeting specific neural circuits responsible for processing reward.
This isn’t just fascinating neuroscience—it’s a dramatic revelation about the malleability of what we consider deeply personal preferences.
The researchers demonstrated that by using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to enhance activity in a particular brain region, participants experienced greater pleasure from music and were willing to spend more money to hear it again. When they inhibited the same region, enjoyment plummeted.
“We’ve essentially found the neurological ‘volume knob’ for music pleasure,” explains Dr. Robert Zatorre, senior author of the study published in Nature Human Behaviour. “This demonstrates that what we think of as subjective aesthetic taste has concrete neurobiological underpinnings that can be externally influenced.”
The Experiment That Changed Music Enjoyment
The McGill team recruited 17 participants for a deceptively simple experiment. Each person underwent three different testing sessions where researchers:
- Enhanced activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)
- Inhibited activity in the same region
- Applied a sham stimulation (control condition)
After each stimulation session, participants listened to snippets of their personal favorite songs alongside researcher-selected tracks. They then rated their enjoyment and indicated how much money they’d be willing to spend to purchase each song.
The results were remarkable: When DLPFC activity was enhanced, participants consistently reported greater enjoyment of the music and expressed stronger motivation to purchase it. When activity was inhibited, the opposite occurred—their favorite songs suddenly seemed less appealing.
“We were surprised by how robust the effect was across participants,” notes Ernest Mas Herrero, a key researcher on the study. “This wasn’t subtle—people genuinely experienced meaningful changes in how they responded to music they normally loved.”
The Biological Basis of Music Appreciation
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have debated why humans universally develop music—an activity with no obvious survival advantage. This study provides compelling evidence that our musical enjoyment is deeply connected to the same reward circuits that evolved to reinforce survival behaviors like eating and reproduction.
The fronto-striatal circuits manipulated in this experiment play a crucial role in how we process reward anticipation and surprise. These same neural pathways:
- Release dopamine during pleasurable experiences
- Help us learn which actions lead to rewards
- Motivate us to repeat rewarding behaviors
- Can malfunction in disorders like addiction and depression
What’s particularly fascinating is how specialized these circuits appear to be. The stimulation didn’t simply make participants happier overall—it specifically altered their response to music while leaving other preferences intact.
Challenging Our Understanding of Personal Preference
Here’s where conventional wisdom gets overturned: Most people believe their music taste represents something fundamentally personal and immutable about themselves. We identify strongly with our musical preferences, often seeing them as expressions of our identity.
But this research suggests our supposedly deeply personal preferences might be more malleable than we realize.
Consider this: If a brief, 20-minute session of non-invasive brain stimulation can meaningfully change how much you enjoy your favorite songs, how stable are these preferences really? The findings challenge our assumptions about the “authenticity” of aesthetic judgments.
“We tend to think of our preferences as reflecting something essential about who we are,” explains Zatorre. “But this research suggests that our aesthetic experiences are dynamic processes that can be modulated by changing patterns of brain activity.”
This doesn’t mean your music taste is random or meaningless. Rather, it suggests that aesthetic experiences emerge from complex neurobiological processes that can be influenced by various factors—including external stimulation.
Beyond Music: Broader Implications for Neuroscience
While this study focused specifically on music enjoyment, the implications extend far beyond your Spotify playlists. The fronto-striatal circuits targeted in this research are implicated in numerous psychological conditions:
Addiction Treatment Potential
The ability to modulate reward circuit function could potentially help people struggling with addiction. By dampening the reward response to addictive stimuli or enhancing it for healthier alternatives, similar stimulation techniques might help rebalance dysregulated reward systems.
“Many psychological disorders such as addiction, obesity, and depression involve poor regulation of reward circuitry,” Zatorre notes. “Showing that pleasure and value of music can be changed by the application of TMS is not only an important—and remarkable—demonstration that the circuitry behind these complex responses is now becoming better understood, but it also has possible clinical applications.”
Depression Intervention
For individuals with depression, the capacity to experience pleasure (known as hedonia) is often diminished. This leads to anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure from activities that were previously enjoyable. Some researchers are already exploring TMS as a depression treatment, and these findings provide additional evidence for its potential efficacy.
Understanding Aesthetic Experience
The study also provides insight into the neurobiological basis of aesthetic experiences more broadly. Similar circuits might underlie our enjoyment of visual art, literature, dance, and other creative expressions.
“[The] findings show that the functioning of fronto-striatal circuits is essential for our enjoyment of music,” says Mas Herrero. “This indicates that the role of these circuits in learning and motivation may be indispensable for the experience of musical pleasure.”
The Neuroscience Behind the Magic
To understand what’s happening here, we need to look more closely at the mechanics of transcranial magnetic stimulation and how it affects brain function.
TMS works by generating brief magnetic pulses that pass through the skull and induce electrical currents in the brain. These currents can either excite or inhibit neural activity in targeted regions. Unlike more invasive neurostimulation techniques, TMS doesn’t require surgery and has minimal side effects.
In this study, researchers targeted the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which sits near the front of the brain and plays essential roles in:
- Executive function
- Working memory
- Cognitive control
- Modulating subcortical reward regions
The DLPFC doesn’t work in isolation; it connects to deeper brain structures like the ventral striatum, which processes reward and releases dopamine during pleasurable experiences. By stimulating the DLPFC, researchers indirectly influenced this entire reward circuit.
This is what makes the finding so significant: Rather than simply creating a temporary “high,” the stimulation altered how participants responded to external stimuli. Their subjective experience of music—something deeply personal—changed in measurable ways.
The Future of Neuromodulation and Personal Choice
While fascinating, this research also raises profound questions about autonomy and identity. If external stimulation can change what we enjoy, what does that mean for our understanding of personal choice?
Dr. Zatorre is careful to emphasize the ethical dimensions: “We’re not suggesting that people should use brain stimulation to change their music preferences. Rather, this research helps us understand the neurobiological basis of aesthetic experiences and could have important clinical applications.”
The therapeutic potential is significant:
- Personalized Interventions: Future treatments might target specific neural circuits based on individual needs.
- Alternative to Medication: Neuromodulation offers a potential alternative to psychoactive drugs for treating certain conditions.
- Rehabilitative Applications: For disorders involving dysregulated reward processing, similar approaches might help “retune” malfunctioning circuits.
- Enhanced Understanding: The more we know about how the brain generates subjective experiences, the better we can address pathologies that affect them.
Mas Herrero envisions broader applications: “Showing that this circuit can be manipulated so specifically in relation to music opens the door for many possible future applications in which the reward system may need to be up or down-regulated.”
Music, Emotion, and the Human Experience
What makes this research particularly fascinating is how it bridges objective neuroscience with subjective experience. Music has extraordinary power to evoke emotions, trigger memories, and create shared social experiences. Understanding its neurobiological underpinnings doesn’t diminish this power—it enriches our appreciation of how remarkable the human brain truly is.
Some key aspects of music processing in the brain:
- Prediction and Surprise: Much of music’s pleasure comes from setting up expectations and then either fulfilling or subverting them in interesting ways.
- Emotional Resonance: Music activates brain regions involved in processing emotions, particularly the limbic system.
- Memory Integration: Musical experiences become intertwined with autobiographical memories, explaining why certain songs can instantly transport us to specific moments in our past.
- Social Bonding: Shared musical experiences trigger synchronization between individuals’ brains, potentially explaining music’s universal role in social rituals.
Practical Implications and Future Research
While this study provides compelling evidence for the malleability of music preferences, it represents just the beginning of this line of research. The sample size was relatively small at 17 participants, and future studies will need to:
- Explore effects across diverse populations
- Determine how long the effects last
- Investigate whether similar effects occur with other aesthetic experiences
- Develop protocols for potential therapeutic applications
“This is really just the tip of the iceberg,” says Zatorre. “We’ve demonstrated a causal relationship between specific brain activity and musical pleasure, but there’s much more to learn about how these circuits operate and how they might be therapeutically targeted.”
The Takeaway: Our Brains on Music
What does all this mean for music lovers? Should we be concerned that our cherished preferences might be more malleable than we thought?
Perhaps a better perspective is amazement at the intricate dance between biology and experience that creates our subjective world. The fact that scientists can now influence something as personal as music preference doesn’t make those preferences less meaningful—it simply highlights how wonderfully complex the relationship between our brains and our experiences truly is.
The next time you’re moved by a beautiful piece of music, consider the remarkable neurobiology behind that experience. Your brain is performing an extraordinary symphony of electrical and chemical processes that transforms sound waves into one of life’s most profound pleasures.
And while researchers can now nudge those processes in different directions, the fundamental mystery of why music moves us so deeply remains one of humanity’s most beautiful puzzles.
This research was published in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behaviour.
