image: Listening to music is an "intellectual" reward, which results from interactions between subcortical dopaminergic regions involved in forming predictions that we share with other animals, and cortically stored templates of previously heard music that are unique to each individual, along with some of the most evolved parts of the cerebral cortex involved in complex pattern recognition and sequencing. These regions ultimately work together to assign reward value to an abstract stimulus. This image relates to a paper that appeared in the April 12, 2013, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by Valorie Salimpoor at McGill University in Montreal, QC, Canada, and colleagues was titled, "Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value." view more
Credit: [Image courtesy of Peter Finnie and Ben Beheshti]