According to “Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing” by Robert Zatorre, what brain region is activated when people hear music that they describe as highly emotional?

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Question

According to “Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing” by Robert Zatorre, what brain region is activated when people hear music that they describe as highly emotional?

Notice: The questions and answer sets for this quiz are protected under copyright, and may not be reproduced without the author's consent.

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

The striatum — a core component of the brain’s reward system — is activated when people hear music they describe as highly emotional.

Relevant knowledge points: the striatum (including the nucleus accumbens/ventral striatum) is centrally involved in reward, pleasure and dopamine-mediated reinforcement. Functional neuroimaging studies of music-evoked emotion commonly measure subjective reports (e.g., “chills” or intense pleasure) and correlate those reports with blood-oxygen-level-dependent signals; Robert Zatorre’s review summarizes this work showing that intensely pleasurable music engages reward circuitry rather than only auditory processing areas.

Step-by-step reasoning:
1. Identify candidate brain regions for music responses: auditory cortex (sound analysis), hippocampus (memory), prefrontal cortex (cognitive control and appraisal), and striatum (reward/pleasure).  
2. Determine which region specifically correlates with intense emotional pleasure: empirical studies cited by Zatorre presented participants with music that they rated as highly emotional or that produced chills and measured brain activity.  
3. Observe imaging outcomes: activity in the ventral striatum/nucleus accumbens increased in direct proportion to reported pleasure and physiological markers of emotional arousal; dopamine release in this region was also reported in PET studies.  
4. Conclude that the striatum is the region specifically activated by highly emotional music.

Why the correct answer is correct: the striatum is consistently implicated in music-evoked pleasure and the subjective experience of strong emotion; it is the reward node that lights up when music produces intense positive affect.

Why other options are incorrect:
- Prefrontal cortex: involved in higher-order appraisal and regulation, not the primary site of pleasure responses to music.  
- Hippocampus: primarily linked to memory encoding and retrieval, not the immediate reward response.  
- Auditory cortex: necessary for processing acoustic features, but not sufficient to explain the reward/pleasure response.

Therefore, the correct answer is Striatum, which matches the provided answer.

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