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Can鈥檛 stand the new Taylor Swift track?听A quick jolt to the brain might change your mind.

Just a few minutes of magnetic stimulation to the front of the brain was all it took听for researchers to increase or decrease people鈥檚 love of music.听They even managed to influence how much of their hard-earned cash they鈥檙e willing to spend on it.

Robert Zatorre of McGill University, Canada and colleagues asked 17 people to listen to pieces of music 鈥� some chosen by the volunteers, and some chosen by the experimenters 鈥� and rate how much the music gave them pleasure. On two occasions, they used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to stimulate part of the brain. In the third trial, participants received a sham treatment in which the brain was not stimulated. The participants were also offered the chance to buy songs with their own money.

Using different forms of stimulation, the researchers were able to excite or inhibit the target brain region, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. When听this region was excited the participants liked the music more, and were willing to spend about 10 per cent more money to buy songs they hadn鈥檛 chosen themselves, compared with the听sham session. When the region was inhibited, they liked the music less and parted with 15 per cent less cash.

Previous studies have shown that applying TMS to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can modulate dopamine release in the striatum, a deeper part of the brain involved in reward processing. The striatum is active when we anticipate pleasure from music, and during the peak experience of musical pleasure.

鈥淭he physiology had been established, but the idea that you could make people like music more or less was a little bit science-fiction,鈥� says Zatorre.

The technique hasn鈥檛 been tried with other types of stimuli, but there鈥檚 no reason to think the mechanism is particular to music, he adds.

鈥淭his is a landmark study providing key evidence of how pleasure is evoked by aesthetic objects,鈥� says at Durham University, UK.

Rewarding results

Understanding how to manipulate these brain circuits could aid therapies for disorders that involve the reward system, says Zatorre. Apathy is a common symptom of depression and Parkinson鈥檚 disease, leaving people unmoved by experiences they used to enjoy. 鈥淎 big part of therapy could be to enhance their well-being by modulating the reward system so that it鈥檚 more responsive to pleasurable stimuli,鈥� he says.

The research is also relevant to disorders like addiction and obsessive behaviours, where it might be helpful to dial down the responsiveness of the reward system.

The volunteers鈥� enjoyment of music was only temporarily altered during the experiment, but there has been at least one recorded case of someone鈥檚 musical preference being permanently altered by a neurological treatment. After having deep brain stimulation to treat obsessive compulsive disorder, a 60-year-old man developed

Read more: Zap to the brain alters libido in unique sex study; Mind controls: Magnetic relief for depression; The musical harmonies you like depend on where you鈥檙e from

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