Your Brain on Music

I subscribe to Discover magazine (great read for you sciency types) and recently they ran a small article which, I think, explains part of the reason we do what we do. The first two paragraphs of the article give a brief description of how our brain responds to music. The article is brief enough I won't summarize it here, I'll let you enjoy reading it for all of the details.

For most of us, our vehicle was our first major step towards freedom and independence. The first significant asset we could call our own and customize as we wanted. And it served as a great platform upon which we could create something more impressive than our peers to showoff in parking lots and other hangouts. It's probably a combination of the above with our brains physiological reaction to the music we love, with a little (or a lot of) lunacy mixed in, that projected us down this pursuit of sonic nirvana. We in car audio take it to varying levels - from small upgrades to vehicle-consuming systems - and to differing extremes of the sound quality to SPL spectrum. Like everything else in life there's probably more going on upstairs in most of us that cause us to take it to the extremes that we do, and give us the love of the hobby that we have. But, in my opinion, our brain's response to the music we love being reproduced in the manor we most enjoy is a fundamental reason we start and subsequently continue down these varied paths of automotive acoustic enhancements.

The findings of the study also seems to bring some vindication and validation to the term "eargasm".

-Impious