Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value

Abstract

Music Was My First Love Why do human beings enjoy music? Salimpoor et al. (p. 216 ) combined behavioral economics with brain scanning to explore how a piece of music is considered rewarding to an individual when it is heard for the first time. They discovered that neural activity in the mesolimbic striatum during listening to a novel piece of music was the best predictor of the money listeners were willing to spend on buying the piece. These observations implicate sensory cortical areas in reward processing, which the authors attribute to the aesthetic nature of the judgment.