Music and the mind: New clues about how we experience pleasure

In 2014, a team of neuroscientists stumbled upon a puzzling minority: people who hear music perfectly well but feel nothing when a favorite song comes on. Their discovery – now called specific musical anhedonia – proved that the emotional rush most of us take for granted is not universal.

A new review led by the University of Barcelona revisits the condition after ten years of laboratory tests, brain scans, and surveys, piecing together how a faulty line of communication inside the brain severs melody from reward.

Testing music’s reward link

To pinpoint musical anhedonia, the Barcelona team created the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ).

This short inventory probes five dimensions of musical enjoyment: emotional response; mood regulation; social bonding; movement and dance; and the thrill of novelty or collecting new tracks.

People who are musically anhedonic score very low across all five areas, yet they show normal reactions to other rewarding activities – whether savoring a dessert, laughing with friends, or winning a small cash prize.

When sound meets no reward

Functional MRI studies soon zeroed in on a wiring problem rather than a global deficit. While listening to music, musically anhedonic participants exhibited normal activation in auditory circuits – the brain regions that decode pitch, rhythm, and harmony.

However, they showed muted activation in the reward circuit that lights up for food, sex, money, or art. Crucially, the same reward circuit fired just fine when those participants experienced non-musical rewards.

“This lack of pleasure for music is explained by disconnectivity between the reward circuit and the auditory network – not by the functioning of their reward circuit, per se,” explained study lead author Josep Marco-Pallarés.

Study co-author Ernest Mas-Herrero added that pleasure depends on linkage, not just circuitry strength. “If the reward circuit is not working well, you get less pleasure from all kinds of rewards.”

“Here, what we point out is that it might be not only the engagement of this circuitry that is important but also how it interacts with other brain regions that are relevant for the processing of each reward type.”

Nature, nurture, or both?

Why the connection breaks down in roughly three to five percent of listeners remains open.

Twin studies published this year suggest heritability could explain about 54 percent of musical-pleasure sensitivity.

Environment might supply the rest: early musical exposure, cultural context, or even a single formative experience could shape wiring between auditory and reward hubs. Researchers are now collaborating with geneticists to hunt for alleles linked to the trait.

Not just about music

Traditional neuroscience has often treated the reward system as a master switch – either on in people who enjoy life, or dimmed in those with depression, addiction, or generalized anhedonia. The new study challenges that simplification.

“A similar mechanism could underlie individual differences in responses to other rewarding stimuli,” Marco-Pallarés said.

If so, there may be undiscovered cousins of musical anhedonia: food anhedonia, social-touch anhedonia, even exercise anhedonia. Each could reflect a different miswired bridge between sensory processors and the same dopamine-rich reward circuit.

Testing touch, taste, and movement

To test that broader theory, scientists will deploy the same playbook: develop stimulus-specific questionnaires, scan people’s brains while they taste, touch, or run, and see whether a subgroup shows selective pleasure deficits.

If found, those patterns could offer fresh insight into addiction (hyper wiring for certain rewards), eating disorders, or behavioral addictions like compulsive gaming – conditions where one reward dominates at the expense of others.

Back in Barcelona, the team also wants to know whether musical anhedonia is fixed or fluid. Does the disconnect fade with time, training, or neuromodulation?

Could curated playlists, rhythmic movement therapies, or even non-invasive brain stimulation coax the auditory and reward networks to sync? Clinical trials are still on the horizon, but the roadmap is clearer than ever.

Music isn’t pleasure for all

Understanding specific musical anhedonia is not just a curiosity about tone-deaf brains. It highlights the individual mosaics of pleasure that define human experience.

One person may feel a crescendo deeply while another just shrugs – and that difference could stem from identifiable neural pathways. As precision medicine advances, mental health interventions may one day target those pathways, dialing up deficient connections or quieting runaway ones.

For now, the research invites a moment of gratitude the next time a song gives you chills. Somewhere else, a perfectly functioning pair of ears registers every note – yet the heart remains unmoved.

By charting that silent gap, neuroscientists hope to map the full topography of human joy, from booming stereos to empty plates.

The study is published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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