As the Academy Awards roll around again this February to celebrate the cinematic achievements of the past year, relatively little of the red carpet attention will be going to the composers nominated in the Best Original Score category. Working behind the scenes instead of at, or in front of, the camera, these are the creators of the soundtracks which engage and manipulate our emotions and can dramatically affect how we feel.

But why does music affect our emotions this drastically? How can a few seconds of a soundtrack send a shiver down our spines, make our blood run cold, and help us completely forget we are being taken in by an illusion? The answer, of course, must lie in our brains, and now a team of neuroscientists at the University of Montreal may be able to throw some light on a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The resulting images of brain activity revealed exactly the sort of pattern the neuroscientists had been looking for: two regions of the brain showed remarkably similar increases in activity when people were listening either to clips of fearful vocalisations or to frightening music (as compared to neutral clips), but not when they were looking at fearful facial expressions. Both of these regions are already known to be involved in processing emotions from other people's voices, faces and body language. The first region is called the insula, a large folded section of the brain that plays a role in your level of self-awareness as well as what happens when you fall in love. The second, the amygdala, consists of two small, almond-shaped groups of neurons involved in everything from how aggressive you are to how much 'personal space' you like to have between you and other people

Read the full article by Catherine Offord about music make your brain feel from the University of Cambridge