For some people, music doesn’t connect with any of the brain’s reward circuits

“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.”

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