Rejuvenation: Robbie Robertson and dopamine

Robbie Robertson with The Band, 1971. Image tSR - Nth Man

Rejuvenation has many faces. It can be a simple walk in park, reading a good book, meditation, yoga. It can result from a focused connection between the inner self and the outer world or between the inner self and the really inner self. Other mental activity fades into the background. 

A short burst can occur at any time. Last Saturday, I was driving to City Floral to get a new houseplant while listening to KBCO. A new song came on: Robbie Robertson’s He Don't Live Here No More (Radio Edit) and the rest was chemical. The “feel good” neurotransmitter dopamine was released.

According to at McGill University neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor:

You're following these tunes and anticipating what's going to come next and whether it's going to confirm or surprise you, and all of these little cognitive nuances are what's giving you this amazing pleasure," said Valorie Salimpoor, a in Montreal. "The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine."

This basically explains why music has been around for so long," she added. "The intense pleasure we get from it is actually biologically reinforcing in the brain, and now here's proof for it."

Robbie’s recent release was new to me, but it was dopamine none-the-less. Eryn Brown of the Los Angeles Times describes the study:

To find out whether dopamine was involved in the enjoyment of music, researchers at McGill University in Montreal asked participants to listen to a favorite selection of music they brought in themselves and to a "neutral" selection of music they hadn't selected.

PET scans showed increased dopamine release when subjects listened to pleasurable music (as opposed to "neutral" music). The fMRI results showed the researchers that the increased dopamine activity occured both during periods of anticipation of hearing the favorite bits of music and during the listening experience itself -- although different parts of the brain were involved.

Music has been important to humankind for millennia, even before the first musical instruments. We are wired for it. Dopamine or not, it’s a great song. You can take issue with the lyrics, but you got to love the driving rhythms.