When the furiously up-tempo chorus of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now explodes into your ears, something remarkable happens. Your brain - that highly strung orchestra of chemicals and circuitry - lights up like a city's neon grid at dusk.

Login or signup to continue reading

The song's slow opening bars have already produced a hit of anticipatory dopamine, the same substance that fires when you're about to eat your favourite food or are in those early intoxicating stages of falling in love.

But as Freddie Mercury's powerful vocals take off, your motor cortex begins syncing to the beat, nudging you to tap your foot or nod your head. Your autonomic nervous system increases your heart rate. Then comes the flood of endorphins and serotonin, those mood elevators that soften stress and, momentarily, convince you life is a grand adventure.

For three glorious minutes Don't Stop Me Now isn't just playing on the stereo. It's pumping through your bloodstream.

Now ask yourself this: when was the last time a modern pop song made you feel such inexpressible joy? Been a while? This is not just the lament of an old fart who swears music was far better in those musical heydays of the '60s and '70s. Now there's scientific proof that songs that lift our mood are becoming increasingly harder to find.

Researchers at the Queen Mary University of London studied chart-topping songs over the past half century and discovered the complexity of pop melodies has decreased significantly since 2000. Producers are trimming intros, compressing choruses and sanding away those rough edges where personality and vibrancy once lived.

With less storytelling and more repetition, this new era of algorithmic auto-tuned pop is leading to a dearth of what psychologists call "autobiographical emotional triggers" - tracks with melodies that are so evocative they become welded to your personal history.

That song playing when you experienced your first kiss or that ballad on high radio rotation during your first breakup? Both are emotional bookmarks, three-minute time machines transporting you back to those days when you were hopelessly romantic and catastrophically insecure.

The most recent pop songs I can think of with similar energy to Don't Stop Me Now are The Black Eyed Peas' homage to hedonism I Got A Feelin' and Flo Rida's Good........

© The Examiner