Autonomic arousal induced by pleasurable music correlates with activation of insula and anterior cingulate cortex

Abstract

Most people derive pleasure from listening to music, which activates limbic and paralimbic brain areas associated with processing of biologically significant rewards, such as food and sex. Music elicits various bodily responses, such as dancing, chills and autonomic nervous system (ANS) responses, such as changes in heart rate or pupil size. This study investigated how pleasurable music affects the ANS, aiming to predict brain activation based on dynamic pupil size changes during music listening. It was expected that pupil size changes would predict activation of the insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which are involved in the modulation of the ANS.

The study, conducted at the Turku PET Center, involved 36 participants who listened to self-selected pleasurable music and control auditory stimuli in two experiments. Brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during music listening in one experiment, while the other measured music induced ANS activation through pupil size changes. fMRI data were modelled with the pupil data to study the connection between the activation of the ANS and specific brain regions and with the subjective pleasure ratings to study the link between neural activity and music-induced pleasure.

The results revealed that insula and ACC activation positively correlated with ANS activity when listening to pleasurable music. Physiological arousal also predicted activation in brain regions related to auditory processing, autonomic regulation, motor control and somatosensation. Music-induced pleasure predicted activation in partly overlapping brain regions, such as the insula, ACC and orbitofrontal cortex. These findings suggest a connection between music-induced pleasure and physiological arousal mechanisms.