Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

One of the things that separates human beings from animals is extensive memories. Animals have memory, sometimes long ones, but not at the same level as humans; a lot of our intellect is remembering things. Humans want to remember, they desire to remember, they get positive reinforcement by remembering because memory cells are literally bathed in dopamine, the mind's feel good drug. Every time you remember, you derive pleasure from it. It's easy to understand that as humans evolved, those that got a dopamine hit from remembering something, especially something important, wanted to do it again, and again, and again, until the human brain became more a repository for memories than the calculating machine it’s often imagined to be. Memories are the real reason brain beats brawn.

The reason the music you grew up makes you feel good but new music doesn't, is because there are no preexisting memory pathways in the brain to stimulate pleasure. The more you hear a particular song, the more pleasurable it becomes. Similar sounding music can stimulate a lot of the same pathways; that's why you can say one song sounds a lot like another, symbiotically generating dopamine. Imagine early humans beating drums, dancing for hours around a fire in wild abandon, high on the repeating rhythm of the drums, where every beat pumped a tiny bit more dopamine & adrenaline into their brains, ultimately collapsing into sexual ecstasy, and it's not hard to understand why homo sapiens were so successful as a species; it’s all due to memory.