Individuals tend to report a complex array of bodily and mental sensations while listening to music, such as the feeling of a lump in the throat, feeling moved and the experience of chills: the tingling sensation on the scalp, back of the neck and spine that is often accompanied by goose bumps ( Panksepp, 1995). Music provides an ideal stimulus with which to study pleasure and reward, as it has been a fixture of every human civilization throughout history and is often reported as one of the most enjoyable of human experiences ( Tramo, 2013). Currently, the neural link between sensory experiences and pleasurable aesthetic responses remains unclear. Others argue that higher order pleasures are an evolutionary exaptation, arising from stimulus-driven recruitment of brain circuitry involved in emotional reaction, response and appraisal ( Huron, 2006). This overlap between aesthetic and social rewards offers the hypothesis that higher order pleasures could have originated because of the prosocial benefits associated with them. Aesthetic judgment further shares its neural correlates in the reward system with moral decision-making ( Avram et al., 2013). The reward system is also active in prosocial functions including cooperation ( Declerck et al., 2013) and self-disclosure ( Tamir and Mitchell, 2012). Aesthetic responses through pursuit of and engagement with the arts activates the same reward network in the brain that responds to the basic, sensory pleasures associated with food, sex and drugs via dopaminergic pathways ( Blood and Zatorre, 2001 Salimpoor et al., 2013). Humans routinely experience pleasure in response to higher order stimuli that confer no clear evolutionary advantage. Our findings provide the first evidence for a neural basis of individual differences in sensory access to the reward system, and suggest that social–emotional communication through the auditory channel may offer an evolutionary basis for music making as an aesthetically rewarding function in humans. Using a combination of survey data, behavioral and psychophysiological measures and diffusion tensor imaging, we found that white matter connectivity between sensory processing areas in the superior temporal gyrus and emotional and social processing areas in the insula and medial prefrontal cortex explains individual differences in reward sensitivity to music. While pleasure from aesthetics is attributed to the neural circuitry for reward, what accounts for individual differences in aesthetic reward sensitivity remains unclear. ![]() However, substantial variability exists in the frequency and specificity of aesthetic responses. Humans uniquely appreciate aesthetics, experiencing pleasurable responses to complex stimuli that confer no clear intrinsic value for survival.
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