Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, likely because it allows expression and regulation of emotion, and evokes pleasure. But how do humans go from perceiving sound patterns to pleasurable responses? Learn about what happens in our brains when we listen to music, in this virtual talk with Dr. Robert Zatorre, a cognitive neuroscientist from McGill University.

About the speaker: Robert Zatorre was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied music and psychology at Boston University, obtained his PhD at Brown University, and carried out a postdoc at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University, where he now holds a Canada Research Chair in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience and heads a lab that studies the neural substrates of auditory cognition, especially music. He cofounded the laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound research (BRAMS), a unique multiuniversity consortium dedicated to the cognitive neuroscience of music. He has been awarded several international prizes, published over 300 scientific papers on pitch perception, auditory imagery, music production, and brain plasticity, and is perhaps best known for discovering how the brain’s reward system results in musical pleasure. He lives in Montreal with his wife and close collaborator Virginia Penhune, and tries to keep up his Baroque repertoire on the organ when he gets a chance.