The first article, The Benefits of Listening to Music: Physiological Response and Connectivity of the Mesolimbic System, discussed the neurological and neurochemical responses to listening to pleasant and unpleasant music. The experiment consisted of thirteen right-handed individuals, six males and seven females, aged between 19 and 23, none of whom had specialized musical training. Each participant was played 20-25 second clips of classical music and coded classical music. To encode the music clips, Levitin and Menon created 250-350 millisecond segments and then randomly rearranged them. The result was a 20-25 second clip of noise that retained the pitches, timbres and volume of the original, while dismantling the musical structure it contained. The participants were then observed while listening to these music clips in an fMRI machine. Levitin and Menon hypothesized that the nucleus accumbens would be strongly activated by classical music and that activity in the nucleus accumbens would correlate with activation in the hypothalamus and ventral tegmental area, which are responsible for autonomic processes and dopamine release, respectively. . The researchers analyzed both the functional and effective connectivity found in the fMRI results. Functional connectivity analysis is a way to determine associations and activation dependency between spatially remote areas of the brain. Effective connectivity analysis allows the observation of interactions between brain regions mediated by anatomical connections. The researchers' hope was that the results of the functional and effective connectivity analyzes would support each other, demonstrating the functional and physical connections between... middle of paper... you can be addicted to music. Further studies are needed on both the nature of behavioral addictions and the directional effects of music listening on interconnected areas of the brain such as the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, and forebrain. While our knowledge of the effects of listening to music is limited, it supports the idea that music can be as addictive as gambling or drugs, although hopefully not as harmful. Works Cited Holden, C. (2010, February 19). Debut of behavioral addictions in the DSM-V proposal.Science, 327, p. 935 Kelley, A.E., Berridge, K.C., 2002. The neuroscience of natural rewards: relevance to addictive drugs. J. Neurosci. 22 (9), 3306–3311. Levitin, V. M. (2005). The benefits of listening to music: physiological response and connectivity of the mesolimbic system. NeuroImage, 175-184.