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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on March 29, 2007
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm011
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Feeling the Real World: Limbic Response to Music Depends on Related Content

Eran Eldar1,2, Ori Ganor1,2, Roee Admon1,2, Avraham Bleich2,4 and Talma Hendler1,2,3

1 Wohl Institute for Advanced Imaging, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Israel, 2 Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, 3 Psychology Department, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, 4 Lev-Hasharon Mental Health Center, Israel

Address correspondence to Talma Hendler, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, 6 Weizmann Street, Tel Aviv 64239, Israel. Email: talma{at}tasmc.health.gov.il.

Emotions are often object related—they are about someone or something in the world. It is yet an open question whether emotions and the associated perceptual contents that they refer to are processed by different parts of the brain or whether the brain regions that mediate emotions are also involved in the processing of the associated content they refer to. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we showed that simply combining music (rich in emotion but poor in information about the concrete world) with neutral films (poor in emotionality but rich in real-world details) yields increased activity in the amygdala, hippocampus, and lateral prefrontal regions. In contrast, emotional music on its own did not elicit a differential response in these regions. The finding that the amygdala, the heart of the emotional brain, responds increasingly to an emotional stimulus when it is associated with realistic scenes supports a fundamental role for concrete real-world content in emotional processing.

Key Words: amygdala • emotion • fMRI • hippocampus • prefrontal cortex

Eran Eldar and Ori Ganor contributed equally to this work.


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