Reward
How does the brain process surprise in pleasant music?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People who find a piece of music highly enjoyable show increased activity and stronger connectivity in their brain's reward centers during unexpected musical moments.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Surprise-related neural responses to unexpected stimuli are modulated by subjective pleasure, linking sensory mismatch with subcortical reward regions like the nucleus accumbens.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Neither surprise alone nor reported pleasure alone accounted for the accumbens response.
Surprise and pleasure interact rather than substitute for one another. Highly surprising musical moments activated auditory cortex, anterior insula and ventral striatum across all participants, but the relationship to nucleus accumbens activity depended on how pleasant listeners reported those moments to be.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
In healthy individuals, the nucleus accumbens is selectively activated by unexpected sensory events, such as musical surprises, but this activation and its functional coupling with the auditory cortex depend heavily on the listener experiencing high subjective pleasantness.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — fMRI while listening to Glass, Mussorgsky, and Ligeti with surprise/chill ratings
- N
- N=40 · 22 women; mean age 25.5; Ligeti behavioral n = 39
- Population
- Healthy adult volunteers listening to contemporary and classical music
- Outcome
- Nucleus accumbens surprise-related activation interacting with music-induced pleasure
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Inspect source passages
How does the brain process surprise in pleasant music?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
three musical pieces
Participants listened to three musical pieces; termed hereafter as Glass, Mussorgsky and Ligeti (see details below).
From a predictive-coding viewpoint, what purpose do musical surprises serve for an organism?
From a predictive-coding viewpoint, surprises provide novel information that may refine an organism’s prediction of future events (i.e. a ‘prediction error’).
Key findings
The researchers found that musical surprises triggered brief increases in emotional arousal and prompted shifts in subjective pleasantness. At the neural level, highly surprising moments activated the auditory cortex, anterior insula, and ventral striatum across all participants. Crucially, only the participants who reported high pleasantness during a piece showed elevated nucleus accumbens activation in response to highly surprising musical events. Furthermore, in the most pleasant piece, this high-pleasantness group exhibited stronger functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and the auditory cortex during surprising moments compared to the low-pleasantness group.
Methodology
Researchers scanned healthy participants using fMRI while they listened to three naturalistic piano pieces of varying complexity. A separate group of musically trained judges annotated the locations and intensity of surprises throughout each composition. Outside the scanner, participants listened to the pieces again to continuously rate their subjective emotional arousal and pleasantness. The researchers then analyzed whether activity in the nucleus accumbens, a key reward region, differed between individuals who experienced high versus low overall pleasantness during the music.
Limitations
To begin with, because the study relied on only three musical pieces from Western classical and art traditions, the findings may not generalize to other musical genres or cultural styles. Additionally, because the emotional ratings were collected during a repeated listening session, the musical events were no longer completely novel to the participants when they reported their pleasantness. Furthermore, the researchers did not measure the participants' subjective experience of surprise directly, relying instead on annotations from an independent group of musicians. Finally, because participants were not randomly assigned to the high- and low-pleasantness groups, other underlying individual differences could account for the observed neural variations.
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