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 the resulting feelings. Put simply, their research has been aimed at answering three questions:

ONE: What is happening within our bodies when we say we are feeling pleasure?
TWO: What are the behaviours that produce these feelings?
THREE: What's the reason these acts cause these responses?

(Our attempts to describe how scientists are answering these questions has been aided by material on The Brain From Top To Bottom)

ONE: there are nerve fibre pathways in and around the limbic system of our brain that scientists call the brain's pleasure, or reward, circuit or system. When these neurons are stimulated, we have what we call pleasurable feelings. The primary source of this activation is a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Other biochemicals such as oxytocin and endorphins are also involved in stimulating feelings of pleasure.

TWO: 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.

THREE: through natural selection, our bodies have developed ways to positively reinforce activities that will help us survive.

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

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

It seems reasonable to presume therefore that singing together is likely to be of a similar order to the other survival behaviours that our bodies encourage us to constantly revisit.

'Nature' wants us to sing together. We get positive feedback 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 that evolution has tagged it with the same pleasure triggers as the other, more obvious, survival essentials?

Probably it's because it's an absolutely collaborative activity - singing together may be the fundamental way of learning to be social. We know that kin connection is biologically determined - connecting beyond immediate family, even though essential for survival, has to be learnt. It appears that 'musicking' is the means that 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 to do it in order to survive.

we can all make music

what makes singing fun

The biological basis of pleasure

making a sound world together