Your Brain in Love: Part 5 – No Room for Romance? Try Music Instead… but not Junk Food
Ed. note: This week, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring a 5-part series about the neuroscience of love and romance. At the end, we’ll put the full series on our website. Enjoy!
Does all this romantic mumbo-jumbo make you feel a little queasy? I have good news: a recent study showed that listening to your favorite music has a similar effect on your brain as other pleasure-inducing activities like having sex. Whether you prefer Tchaikovsky or tango, Mozart or Michael Jackson, MRI and PET scans reveal that when you listen to music that excites you, your brain releases dopamine during the most exciting moments of the song and even in anticipation of those moments.
Some things a person does can produce so much dopamine that over time, the dopamine response lessens, which means you can lose the ability to feel any kind of pleasure at all. The usual culprits of this dopamine dulling effect are things like cocaine and heroin, which is good news for the great majority of us who are not addicted to illicit substances. The bad news is that if you’re addicted to fatty foods, the same thing could potentially happen to you. If you let rats eat as much cheesecake, bacon, sausage, and other fatty foods as they want, not only will they become obese, but their dopamine responses will start to attenuate over time. So while a small slice of cheesecake once in a while may get your dopamine flowing, overdoing it may have negative consequences on your brain and on your waistline.
Read Part 1: When Love is a Many-Splendored Thing
Read Part 2: Love and Marriage
Read Part 3: The Neuroscience of Date Night
Read Part 4: Oxytocin, the Love/Hate Hormone
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Posit Science's corporate blog is the place where our employees share their thoughts about Posit Science and its products, brain fitness, breakthroughs in neuroscience, and any other topic they find interesting and relevant. 
February 16th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Really enjoyed reading through your posts, you have a very nice writing style! I hope we’ll have a chance to meet one day (I am a friend and fan of you father’s) Best, -Portia Iversen
February 18th, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Remember this when you are eating that cheesecake for the umteenth time.
March 16th, 2011 at 1:13 am
What a great collection of great posts in your website. I hope I can produce something of that quality one day Congratulations!!. I’ve been looking for this information in many sites related to this subject thank god I found your site! Thanks a lot!
March 31st, 2011 at 9:21 am
Good post, interesting point of view.