We turn on the radio. It sounds like a theme that we do not know; in fact, we neither recognize the singer's voice nor the style. But we like it. And we like it so much that it inevitably sticks with us, we can't stop humming it and we desperately go looking for it. We even tried humming it to friends in the hope that someone would identify it and tell us who the artist is.
And it is that when a song arouses our curiosity and generates pleasure, the reward system of the brain is activated, which pushes us to invest effort and time in looking for more information, and also makes us capable of remembering it days later. . The more curiosity, the more memory. The same happens in other areas of knowledge, such as art. Curiosity and pleasure are crucial for learning.
It is one of the main conclusions drawn from a citizen science experiment, called 'Being a curious mind' by neuroscientists at the Institut d'Investigació Biomèdica de Bellvitge (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona in the framework of the Sònar electronic music festival.
In the last edition, they recruited 150 people, men and women, who attended a concert in which DJ Alícia Carrera played 20 previously unreleased experimental dance music tracks by artists who donated their songs for the studio. All themes had the same duration and structure. After listening to each theme, the volunteers had to rate how much they liked it on a mobile application created for the occasion by answering a series of questions. Likewise, they had to decide if they wanted to invest fictitious coins -sónar coins- to learn more about the group or the song itself.
The next day, they had to listen to a series of pieces, both the ones they had heard the day before and as many new ones, and identify if they were able to remember any of the ones they had already heard in the previous session.
After analyzing the results, the researchers, led by Icrea Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, head of the IDIBELL-UB cognition and brain plasticity research group, saw that the degree of curiosity felt by the volunteers was closely linked to memory. In this sense, on average the participants remembered 80% of the topics that they had heard in the previous session and that they had liked. The youngest participants - between 20 and 30 years old - were able to remember more songs than the oldest - between 40 and 60 years old.
"The effect of curiosity on memory is very strong," says Rodríguez-Fornells, who explains that curiosity is associated with reward circuits. “Information works like a reward. Wanting to know more about a song or artist activates the dopaminergic system, and when dopamine increases, it increases the ability of the hippocampus [a region of the brain responsible for learning] to encode information. The things we like open the door for more information to come in and we codify it more”, adds this researcher.
According to the authors of this work, which they have presented in the framework of Sònar 2022 and which they now hope to publish in a scientific journal, their results are applicable to learning in general: the richer the environment in which a person is immersed in stimuli, more curiosity it will generate, which will lead to a better encoding of the environment and, therefore, more learning.
Another of the interesting results of the study is that the evaluation of the songs did not have so much to do with the subject itself but with the profile of the participants. That is, the same song received one score or another not so much for its structure, for example, or melody, but for the musical tastes of the participant, which tended to be similar to those of profiles of participants similar to him.
"The characteristics of each person, as well as the cultural and social influences of the environment are crucial, more than the subject itself," Rodríguez-Fornells points out. “If a friend highly values a song, your brain's reward system will already place a value on it, because you value your friend's opinion. Music already enters the brain biased and the discovery does not usually come alone, but very affected by the social context, ”she explains.
Previous knowledge also influences the curiosity aroused by a song. In fact, in the experiment they saw that those people who were more curious and decided to invest more money in learning more about the subject were those who had listened to more music of this style before. Having prior knowledge about a topic generates more curiosity in the person and also more pleasure.
“Many times something can make you curious, but that does not translate into a behavior of searching or investing efforts in knowing more. Curiosity is very volatile and determines how interests are generated throughout life”, highlights Rodríguez-Fornells. In this sense, the researchers have used machine learning algorithms to predict from the responses of the participants in the app after listening to each topic if they will dedicate resources or not to obtain more information.
"It's a paradox, because many people say they like music, that it makes them curious, but they don't invest anything in learning more," says researcher Icrea. "Understanding how the brain decodes music into an enjoyable and rewarding experience and what drives it to exert effort is a fascinating question that could be crucial to understanding how humans process abstract stimuli and relate it to intrinsically motivated activities," he adds.
Now the researchers want to repeat the experiment with more people and including different musical styles.
