Music and "Dope"

I knew there was a reason I'd drive an hour to listen to a great band or fly to Louisiana for one of the zillion music and dance festivals down there. Neurologists at McGill University have evidence of what I already knew. Pleasurable music unleashes a flood of dopamine that rocks my world. Dopamine is the brain chemical associated with experiencing food, drugs, and sex. Do I have your attention now?

It's why I put down the dishes and spontaneously start dancing around the kitchen table or want to put my arms around a like-minded partner absolutely anywhere when I hear a bluesy slow drag or a compelling up-tempo swing, zydeco, pop, rhythm n blues number. The rhythms, instruments, emotive voice, or lyrics or all of it put together in one high-rolling tsumami flip the switch on my internal pleasure meter. I'm momentarily sucked into a fourth dimension. Self-consciousness falls away. A Niagra Falls of playfulness, sensuality, creative juices, levity, and symbiotic connection spills from my synapses. When I dance with a woman who's mainlining the same music, it's like invincibly roaring down Niagra Falls without the barrel.

Tons of you out there know this for a fact. The right music, whatever really gets you off, fires up "dope" you won't get arrested for ingesting in public. It grandly sweeps away any pressing matters in your life.

A scientist will not need a PET scanner or MRI to measure the massive amounts of dopamine I'll consume, or will consume me, during Mardi Gras in Lafayette next week. The goofy smile on my face will be empiric evidence of the first order.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1718831/listening-to-music-releases-same-brain-chemicals-as-food-drugs-sex

Comments

[Carolyn Liesey]

Cute, I think there is more to it because some of love music, but do not get quite that response. Have a good time at mardi gras.

[Rebecca Wilson]

I like it and, of course, totally get it. { :

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.]

I was thinking that when I wrote this piece, Carolyn, so thanks for bringing it up. I guess it what turns on the dopamine, other than the food, drugs, and sex mentioned in the research, has to do with our individual chemistries. I know there are other acts in daily life that give me pleasure but specific kinds of music and dance consistently fire up my dopamine to a remarkable level. I'm looking forward to Mardi Gras. I know I won't be the only one with a goofy dopamine fueled smile when the music comes along.

[Bambi Good]

You are a liver!!!!!! You have found life as almost nobody else I know! May it be even better than you know it will be!

[Susan Edwards]

It's amazing how still my mind gets when I'm dancing! That usual buzzsaw in my head fades away. Music, dancing, ahh...

[Paul Tamburello aka pt at large]

Interesting take, Susan, I never thought of it through that lens. I guess when the sound of the buzzsaw fades away, the music and dance occupies all the available space on my psychic hard drive and I delight in the sense of suffusion. For me it expresses itself in a sense of liberation that connects with my body at the cellular level. Things get really amplified when I dance with a partner who feels it the same way I do.

I wonder what you feel when that sense of "still" happens. I wonder whether it helped you get through a four year project making your documentary film about Marion Stoddard?

[May Louise White]

AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[CNKeach]

You are SO right. Right now I'm listening to Whitney's version of a gospel song. I'm not dancing, but I am MOVED majorily -- crying and laughing simultaneously.

[Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.]

Music as elegy is powerful stuff,isn't it, probably has ancient roots. This was such a sad saga, shook the music nation because we all had a piece of her music in our emotional juke boxes. Farewell, Whitne

[Susan Sullivan]

YY Paul