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Can you make a quick mental list of some all-time favorite songs that make you feel good and that you'd purchase if Spotify, or your favorite music streaming service, was no longer available? Conversely, can you think of a few songs that make you want to change the station immediately or put in earplugs?

As someone who is self-admittedly stuck in the 1970s and ‘80s regarding my musical preferences, any Top 40 song from the summer of 1983 (e. ., "Holiday," "Flashdance...What a Feeling") is guaranteed to make me feel good. There is one exception to this rule: Even though I'm a huge Annie Lennox and Eurythmics fan, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," never fails to make my skin crawl. Whenever this dark and nihilistic song comes on the car radio, I change the station as quickly as possible.

As a 53-year-old, almost all of the songs currently on Billboard's Hot 100 leave me flat. (Yes, I'm turning into an old fuddy-duddy.) On a gut level, I’m constantly amazed that my 11-year-old daughter derives such ecstatic pleasure from turning up the radio and singing along to current pop music at the top of her lungs. Most of these prefabricated sounding songs seem formulaic and dull to me. That said, of course, my tween thinks most of the music I loved when I was her age in 1977 is sappy, simplistic, and makes her eyes glaze over with boredom. Intellectually, I’m intrigued by how my daughter and I could have such dramatically different musical tastes and preferences.

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As I type this, I’m reminded that my mom recently told me how much her parents (who were born in the early-20th century) detested the “rock ‘n’ roll” music of the 1950s. When she was a teenager, my grandparents forbid my mother from buying Elvis Presley records when he was the undeniable “King of Pop.” (See, "One More Reason to Keep Dancing.") Anecdotally, across generations, it seems that parents typically can't relate to the teenybopper music and songs that are cherished by their adolescent children.

From a perspective, I’ve long suspected there was probably an explanation for why each of us seems to have such different visceral responses to certain genres of music and specific songs.

Yesterday, an international team of researchers published a new paper, “Dopamine Modulates the Reward Experiences Elicited by Music,” in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This study helps to explain why music listening, singing, and playing can be such a pleasurable experience. The research also shows why some songs fail to elicit hedonic feelings.

This -based study was led by first author Laura Ferreri when she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Cognition, Development, and Educational Psychology at the University of Barcelona along with colleagues from McGill University, New York University, and Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Ferreri is currently an associate professor at the Laboratoire d’Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs (EMC) at Université Lumière in Lyon, France.

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As the authors explain, “The question addressed here is to what extent dopaminergic transmission plays a direct role in the reward experience (both motivational and hedonic) induced by music. We report that pharmacological manipulation of dopamine modulates musical responses in both positive and negative directions, thus showing that dopamine causally mediates musical reward experience.”

For this double-blind experiment, the researchers manipulated how dopamine was able to modulate responses to music by orally administering two different substances that influence dopaminergic synaptic ability.

The first dopamine influencer was something called "levodopa," which is a dopamine precursor. On another visit to the laboratory, each participant was given a dopamine antagonist called "risperidone," which blocks feel-good dopamine receptors that drive the pleasure and reward circuitry of the brain. A (lactose) was also orally administered in one of the three different music-listening sessions that occurred on three separate days for each participant in this study.

During each 20-minute listening session, study volunteers listened to a combination of self-selected songs they brought to the lab and also some songs that were randomly chosen by the researchers.

Pleasurable responses (or lack thereof) were gauged using both skin sensors that measure electrodermal activity and self-reported questionnaires. As the ultimate test of just how much someone liked a specific song, study participants were asked if they would be willing to buy a particular song and how much they’d be willing to pay for that song in a token economy.

The researchers discovered that when someone was given the dopamine—blocker risperidone, he or she was significantly less willing to pay for any of the music. On the flip side, after receiving levodopa, which boosts the ability of dopamine to target dopaminergic synapses, participants experienced more intense music-evoked pleasure. Additionally, levodopa increased study participant's willingness to buy music and to pay more for a specific feel-good song.

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As an anecdotal example of a song I paid an exorbitant amount to buy, a few years ago I shelled out big bucks on eBay for a very rare, DJ-only vinyl promotional "not for sale" copy of the Madonna "Like a Prayer" remixes by Shep Pettibone. Based on the latest research by Ferreri et al. (2019), this song clearly opens the dopaminergic floodgates in my brain without needing a hit of levodopa.

"We demonstrate that levodopa and risperidone led to opposite effects in measures of musical pleasure and : while the dopamine precursor levodopa, compared with placebo, increased the hedonic experience and music-related motivational responses, risperidone led to a reduction of both. This study shows a causal role of dopamine in musical pleasure and indicates that dopaminergic transmission might play different or additive roles than the ones postulated in affective processing so far, particularly in abstract cognitive activities," the authors conclude.