We Can All Make Music.

What makes singing fun?

The biological basis of pleasure

There are things we do that give us pleasure. Scientists have spent ages trying to discover both the “how” and the “why” of the connections between these acts and our resultant feelings. Put simply, their research has been aimed at answering three questions:

1. What is happening within our bodies when we say we are feeling pleasure?
2. Which behaviours produce these feelings?
3. Why do these behaviours cause these responses?

Our attempts to describe how scientists are answering these questions has been aided by material found in the article “The Brain From Top To Bottom’. Below is what we learned from the article regarding the three questions above.

What is happening within our bodies when we say we are feeling pleasure?

There are nerve fibre pathways in and around the limbic system of our brain which scientists call the brain's pleasure / reward circuit or system. When these neurons are stimulated, we experience what we call “pleasurable feelings”. The primary source of this activation is a via the release of dopamine. Other biochemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins are also involved in stimulating feelings of pleasure.

Which behaviours produce these feelings?

Maternal behaviour, eating and drinking, and sexual activity have all been discovered to stimulate the release of these biochemicals. What these behaviours have in common is that they are all essential for the survival of the individual and the species.

Why do these behaviours cause these responses?

Through natural selection, our bodies have developed ways to positively reinforce activities which will help us survive.

There is a mass of anecdotal evidence which supports the observation that when people sing together they find it enjoyable. They say they feel “joyful”, “better”, ‘uplifted”, ‘energised”, “excited”, “good”, and “blissful”. Many also say they find themselves wanting to do it again and again, because they know these feeling will return.

These subjective experiences are supported by research which confirms that the brain's reward system is stimulated by singing together.

It seems reasonable to presume therefore that singing together is likely to be of a similar order to the other survival behaviours which our bodies encourage us to constantly revisit, such as eating or drinking.

“Nature” therefore wants us to sing together because we receive emotional rewards when we do - it's nature's way of encouraging us to do something useful, something that will help us to survive.

What is it about singing together that is so important for us that evolution has tagged it with the same pleasure triggers as the other (more obvious) survival essentials?

This is probably because it's an absolutely collaborative activity - singing together may be the fundamental way of learning sociability. We know that “kin connection” is biologically determined, but connecting beyond our immediate family, even though essential for survival, has to be learnt. It appears that “musicking” is the means evolution has given us to develop our capacity to become social, and so the “doing of it” brings us enormous pleasure.

Singing together is fun because we must do it in order to survive.

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