Today, one of my favorite songs, “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, was playing on Spotify. Something about that song just feels so right. It hits me in a way that is hard to describe–it makes me feel both relaxed and stimulated all at once. Noticing the feeling that this song, plus other songs I love, gives me made me wonder about the psychology of our favorite songs: Why do we love the songs we do?

Lucky for me, researchers of the University of Michigan researched why we can listen to our favorite songs over and over without getting bored. The researchers had 204 participants fill out a questionnaire about their experience with favorite songs. About 86% of people studied reported listening to their favorite song daily or several times a week. 43% of those who listened to it each day said they played it at least three times a day, and 60% listened to the song several times in a row. Interestingly, when people said that the song generated mixed emotions, “a bittersweet feeling,” they played the song more.

These psychologists explained that we listen to certain songs repeatedly because they activate the reward system in our brain, releasing dopamine and generating a kind of addictive process. Since certain songs make us feel good, we want to listen to them again and again. In a different study at McGill University, researchers found that when we know a song very well, an intense discharge of dopamine occurs in our brain when we anticipate certain parts of the song. And, a study conducted at the Wake Forest School of Medicine showed that our brain reacts as a whole to a favorite song; this does not happen when we listen to music we do not like. Well-loved songs make our brain light up all over, showing greater connectivity. An area that is particularly active when we listen to our fave tunes is the precuneus, an area of ​​the upper parietal lobe that is related to episodic memory, visuospatial processing, reflections on oneself, and self-consciousness.

I find all this so interesting. It just goes to show that favorite songs stimulate a very different brain process than other tunes. But, whether or not you care about why this happens, I’m sure you’ll agree that the feeling we get from our best-loved music is pretty cool.

References

Conrad, F., et al. (2018). Extreme re-listening: Songs people love . . . and continue to love. Psychology of Music. 

Delgado, J. Why do we listen repeatedly to our favorite songs? Accessed at https://psychology-spot.com/favorite-song-favorite-music/ on December 12, 2021.

Salimpoor, V. N., et al. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipating and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14, 257–262.

Wilkins, R. W. et. Al. (2014) Network Science and the Effects of Music Preference on Functional Brain Connectivity: From Beethoven to Eminem. Scientific Reports, 4, 6130.