[1] One day several years ago, Valorie Salimpoor took a drive that changed her life. Salimpoor, a neuroscience graduate, was struggling to decide on her career path. She felt that a drive might help clear her head. When she turned on the car radio, a piece of violin music came on: Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5.
“Something just happened,” she recalls. “I just felt this rush of emotion. . . It was so intense. ” She stopped the car so she could focus on the music. She wondered why it had such a powerful effect on her.
[2] Salimpoor found a job working as a neuroscientist. Her research involved scanning people’s brain activity as they listened to music. She discovered that when people listen to music they like, their brains flood with dopamine—a chemical linked with pleasure and motivation. In one experiment, people listened to the first 30 seconds of unfamiliar songs.
The listeners were then given the option of buying the full songs, using their own money. By analyzing dopamine-related areas of the participants’ brains, Salimpoor was able to successfully predict which songs the people would choose to buy; she could tell what they liked and what they didn’t based on brain activity.
[3] But why might one person like a song while another person doesn’t?
Salimpoor says it all depends on past musical experiences. “Eastern, Western, jazz, heavy metal, pop—all of these have different rules they follow,” she says. These rules are recorded as patterns, or templates, in
A. An experiment showed that classical music usually makes people happy.
B. Researchers found a link between music and chemical activity in the brain.
C. According to a study, certain types of music can slow down brain activity.
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A. It brought back a very happy memory.
B. It had a strong effect on her career.
It made her think of a favorite piece of music.
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A. special tools that are used in brain scan experiments
B. types of music that have a very strong emotional impact
C. patterns in the brain that relate to certain types of music
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A. where memory templates are stored in the brain
B. which part of the brain produces the most dopamine
C. what happens in our brains when we listen to music
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