We enjoy music because it uplifts us. Why does it give us a wonderful feeling? Neuroscientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre offered a solution in 2001 while working at McGill University in Montreal. They used magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate that those who were listening to enjoyable music had the limbic and paralimbic portions of their brains active, which are linked to euphoric reward responses, such as those we feel from sex, delectable food, and addictive substances. These benefits originate from a flood of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Music is the drug, as DJ Lee Haslam previously stated.

Yet why? It's simple to see why food and sex give us a dopamine high because they make us want more, which helps with our survival and reproduction. (Some medicines counteract that survival drive by tricking the body into releasing dopamine.) But why would a series of noises that had no apparent survival benefit act in the same way?

In actuality, nobody is aware. But there are now a lot of hints as to why music evokes strong feelings. The philosopher and composer Leonard Meyer proposed that emotion in music is all about what we expect and whether or not we receive it in 1956, which later became the current popular theory among scientists who investigate how we absorb music cognitively. Meyer drew inspiration from older psychological theories of emotion, which suggested that feelings of emotion develop when we are unable to fulfil a wish. You may suppose that causes annoyance or rage - but the reward is even greater if we eventually find what we're seeking for, whether it's love or cigarette.

Meyer argued that music also accomplishes this. It creates aural regularities and patterns that urge us to make assumptions about what will happen next. If we are correct, the brain rewards itself with a small amount of dopamine, as we now understand. Thus, the ongoing dance between expectation and result stimulates the brain with a delightful emotional play.

But why should it matter if our musical expectations are accurate or not? It's not like their actions would make or break us. Ah, but perhaps once it did, argues musicologist David Huron of Ohio State University. Making assumptions about our environment and interpreting what we see, hear, and feel based on incomplete information may have once been crucial to our survival and it still is frequently, such as when crossing the street.