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The court decided otherwise.
So why is it that one person might spend $2 on a song while another pans it? Salimpoor says it all depends on past musical experiences. “Depending on what styles youre used to — Eastern, Western, jazz, heavy metal, pop — all of these have very different rules they follow, and they’re all implicitly recorded in your brain,” she says. “Whether you realize it or not, every time you’re listening to music, you’re constantly activating these templates that you have.”
Using those musical memory templates, the nucleus accumbens then acts as a prediction machine, she says. It predicts the reward that you’ll feel from a given piece of music based on similar types of music you’ve heard before. If you like it better than predicted, it registers as intense pleasure. If you feel worse than predicted, you feel bored or disappointed.
“New music is presumably rewarding not only because it fits implicitly learned patterns but because it deviates from those patterns, however slightly,” Wheatley says. But this finding leads to new questions. “It just made me wonder whether people have different preferences or tolerances for how much a new song deviates from the well-worn path of previously heard music structures.”