Performance of Music Elevates Pain Threshold and Positive Affect: Implications for the Evolutionary Function of Music

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The social role of touch in humans and primates: behavioural function and neurobiological mechanisms.

R. Dunbar (2010)

Grooming is a widespread activity throughout the animal kingdom, but in primates (including humans) social grooming, or allo-grooming (the grooming of others), plays a particularly important role in social bonding which, in turn, has a major impact on an individual's lifetime reproductive fitness. New evidence from comparative brain analyses suggests that primates have social relationships of a qualitatively different kind to those found in other animal species, and I suggest that, in primates, social grooming has acquired a new function of supporting these. I review the evidence for a neuropeptide basis for social bonding, and draw attention to the fact that the neuroendrocrine pathways involved are quite unresolved. Despite recent claims for the central importance of oxytocin, there is equally good, but invariably ignored, evidence for a role for endorphins. I suggest that these two neuropeptide families may play different roles in the processes of social bonding in primates and non-primates, and that more experimental work will be needed to tease them apart.

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Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion.

A J Blood, R J Zatorre (2001)

We used positron emission tomography to study neural mechanisms underlying intensely pleasant emotional responses to music. Cerebral blood flow changes were measured in response to subject-selected music that elicited the highly pleasurable experience of "shivers-down-the-spine" or "chills." Subjective reports of chills were accompanied by changes in heart rate, electromyogram, and respiration. As intensity of these chills increased, cerebral blood flow increases and decreases were observed in brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal, including ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral medial prefrontal cortex. These brain structures are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse. This finding links music with biologically relevant, survival-related stimuli via their common recruitment of brain circuitry involved in pleasure and reward.

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Regional mu opioid receptor regulation of sensory and affective dimensions of pain.

J Zubieta, Y Smith, J Bueller … (2001)

The endogenous opioid system is involved in stress responses, in the regulation of the experience of pain, and in the action of analgesic opiate drugs. We examined the function of the opioid system and mu-opioid receptors in the brains of healthy human subjects undergoing sustained pain. Sustained pain induced the regional release of endogenous opioids interacting with mu-opioid receptors in a number of cortical and subcortical brain regions. The activation of the mu-opioid receptor system was associated with reductions in the sensory and affective ratings of the pain experience, with distinct neuroanatomical involvements. These data demonstrate the central role of the mu-opioid receptors and their endogenous ligands in the regulation of sensory and affective components of the pain experience.