“I was talking with my colleagues at a conference 10 years ago and I just casually said that everyone loves music,” recalls Josep Marco Pallarés, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona. But it was a statement he started to question almost immediately, given there were clinical cases in psychiatry where patients reported deriving absolutely no pleasure from listening to any kind of tunes.
So, Pallarés and his team spent the past 10 years researching the neural mechanisms behind a condition they called specific musical anhedonia: the inability to enjoy music.
The wiring behind joy
When we like something, it is usually a joint effect of circuits in our brain responsible for perception—be it perception of taste, touch, or sound—and reward circuits that give us a shot of dopamine in response to nice things we experience. For a long time, scientists attributed a lack of pleasure from things most people find enjoyable to malfunctions in one or more of those circuits.
You can’t enjoy music when the parts of the brain that process auditory stimuli don’t work properly, since you can’t hear it in the way that you would if the system were intact. You also can’t enjoy music when the reward circuit refuses to release that dopamine, even if you can hear it loud and clear. Pallarés, though, thought this traditional idea lacked a bit of explanatory power.
“When your reward circuit doesn’t work, you don’t experience enjoyment from anything, not just music,” Pallarés says. “But some people have no hearing impairments and can enjoy everything else—winning money, for example. The only thing they can’t enjoy is music.”
To reliably screen for such people, his team designed the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire: a list of questions meant to assess different ways people engage with music, ranging from mood regulation to sensorimotor experiences like tapping or dancing. Using it, Pallarés found 15 people who scored very low on his questionnaire and who apparently did not enjoy music at all. They were compared to 15 who scored very high and were basically music lovers, and another 15 who were middle-of-the-road between those two extremes. Then, his team put all of them in a functional MRI brain scanner and played them some nice tunes. And he also had them gamble.
Connectivity issues
The experiment consisted of two tests. The first was simply listening to music. The second involved betting on choosing a winning number out of two randomly presented options, with the chance to win a modest payout. Using the fMRI, they were able to see that gambling wins lit up the reward circuit in the 15 people Pallarés suspected of specific musical anhedonia. Music on the other hand, had no effect on reward circuits.
In the music lovers, songs activated the same circuit much more than winning money, and the middle-of-the-road group saw similar activity in both scenarios.
What made people with specific musical anhedonia different from the two other groups was how the different regions in the brain communicated with each other.
“Based on those fMRI experiments, we could figure out if it was about the connection between two different circuits—the one responsible for perception and the one responsible for reward—rather than about the functioning of those circuits themselves,” Pallarés explains. People who did not derive pleasure from music could hear it, as the auditory networks in their brains lit up on the scans (as they should). The reward circuit was also up and running, but the connection between them wasn’t working for some reason; it was as if information simply couldn’t get through.
This disconnection, Pallarés thinks, may involve a neural mechanism similar to that involved in many other conditions that make people unable to enjoy things like food, sex, or social interactions. But beyond that, we don’t know a lot.
Nature vs. nurture
The first thing that’s uncertain is whether specific musical anhedonia is a stable trait. Is the disconnection in the brain that seemingly causes it permanent, or can it be modulated through some kind of training, therapy, or even pharmacological interventions? Pallarés and his colleagues are already busy working on these questions, having started by looking at our DNA.
“We want to learn to what extent specific musical anhedonia has genetic basis and to what extent it stems from cultural conditioning,” Pallarés says. His co-authors have already performed an initial study to trace the genes responsible for this condition. “They found about 50 percent of variance in our sensitivity to music is explained by the genetic component,” Pallarés explains.
Once the nature vs. nurture question is settled, the team wants to see if the mechanism generalizes to other, similar conditions. “We want to see if a similar disconnection causes other disorders which are also very specific to certain stimuli. Then we’ll have to go and see if we can revert that,” Pallarés says.
Pallarés' paper outlining his work on specific musical anhedonia is published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.06.015
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