canada.com - A song in your head: Brainwaves

"A team of researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute, using the world's most advanced brain-mapping machines, have found that the same neural clusters that process the seductive pleasures of sex, chocolate and even hard drugs also fire up for music.

There is also persuasive evidence that the brain tends to prune these neural circuits for maximum pleasure the way a gardener cuts unproductive branches to make a rose bush bloom. Music, it seems, may make the brain bloom best because it literally electrifies, at lightning speed, a web of nerve paths in both hemispheres of our cerebral cortex that connect the neural clusters processing musical pitch, rhythm, harmony, melody, short term memory, long term memory, and emotions. Now, for the first time, neuroscientists mapping the musical mind at McGill University have confirmed that those music circuits also comprise the inch-worm shaped clusters that process exquisite pleasures, including illicit ones. But unlike other addictions, it leaves no hangover, drug habits, clogged arteries, or sexual diseases."

McGill University (my grandparent's alma mater) is doing some interesting research into how music is handled by the brain.  Sounds reasonable to me ;)

"viablogcritics"