Retraining of drug reward, music cues and state-dependent recall in music therapy

Brain research revealed that pleasant music appreciation is processed in same brain reward areas as euphoriant drugs. This indicates a similarity in processing intensity of emotions in the brain. These insights shed a new light on how music and emotion are linked in the brain. However, patients, with a history of drug-induced euphoria, may experience a state- dependent recall induced from certain individually perceived cues, which have been experienced together with drugs, as memory traces are stored as conditioned secondary rewards in drug memory. Music’s state-dependent cognition processes seem to be recalled (and thereby also the drug action) when listening to music without being under the influence. These learning processes have to be focused and transformed in therapy by offering new ways of learning to recognize, retrain and integrate state-specific emotional responses to preferred music to rebalance emotion and experiencing reward.