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In Musicophilia, neurologist Sacks praises music’s ability to restore pleasure and feeling to those numbed by grief, and recounts how, after the death of a beloved aunt, he was unable to mourn until he attended a concert and heard The Lamentations of Jeremiah, by Jan Dismas Zelenka, an obscure contemporary of Bach. “My emotions, frozen for weeks, were flowing once again,” he writes. After the death of his mother, Sacks walked around New York “lifeless as a zombie” until he heard strains of Schubert from an open basement window. “I wanted to linger . . . Schubert, and only Schubert, I felt, was life.”

If Sacks were to visit the International Laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound Research in Montreal, he would make an ideal subject for research undertaken by neuropsychologist Robert Zatorre and his associate Anne Blood. In 2000, they performed positron emission tomography (PET) scans on 10 McGill students trained in music as they listened to pieces they had chosen, and to which they had previously had “an intensely pleasant emotional response,” including the all-important “chills.” Selections included the Intermezzo from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3 in D Minor, and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Blood and Zatorre found that the greater the chills, the greater the changes in heart rate and respiration, and the more blood flowed into brain regions believed to be involved in reward and motivation, emotion and arousal—the same pleasure centers stimulated by food, sex, and addictive drugs. “Music, although it is abstract, still seems to activate the same neural pathways,” Zatorre says.

The question, of course, is why. For Zatorre and many other neuroscientists, what goes on in the brain’s substrates is linked to the very essence of human evolution. “An animal needs something to tell it how to survive, and the way the brain reacts to music seems to be akin to the way it reacts to all the things that are important to survival,” Zatorre says.

That argument is taken further by musicologist David Huron, head of the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Laboratory at Ohio State University and author of Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Interviewed over the phone, with a purring cat on his lap (“I’m getting a nice rush of oxytocin here”), Huron is exuberant as he describes his research, which included an experiment he conducted as a professor at the University of Waterloo.

He was studying the effect sad or happy music might have on the perception of a group of Psychology 101 students who had been told that the experiment had a different goal entirely: to study changes in their heart rates. Half the students listened to “happy” music—a selection of bluegrass tunes. (Huron calls it the Steve Martin effect: “It’s hard to play sad music on a banjo,” he says, for musicological reasons that have been dissected at great length, but that seem to boil down to the fact that banjos “plink,” while more resonant instruments like the guitar go “dnng.”) For the sad-music group, researchers selected tracks from Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. Each group listened to the music for 15 minutes. Then a researcher interviewed the students, asking them, among other things, to estimate how well they would do on their final grades.

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