About a decade ago, scientists identified a small group of people who feel no enjoyment when listening to music, even though their hearing is normal and they experience pleasure from other activities. This phenomenon is known as “specific musical anhedonia.” It occurs when the brain regions responsible for hearing fail to properly communicate with the areas that generate feelings of reward. In a study published in the Cell Press journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the researchers who first described this condition explain how it works in the brain and why it may offer broader insight into how people experience pleasure and happiness.
“A similar mechanism could underlie individual differences in responses to other rewarding stimuli,” says author and neuroscientist Josep Marco-Pallarés of the University of Barcelona. “Investigating these circuits could pave the way for new research on individual differences and reward-related disorders such as anhedonia, addiction, or eating disorders.”
Measuring How Rewarding Music Feels
To identify people with musical anhedonia, the research team created a standardized assessment called the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ). This tool evaluates how rewarding an individual finds music across five dimensions. These include emotional response, mood regulation, social bonding, physical movement such as dancing, and the desire to seek out or collect new musical experiences. Individuals with musical anhedonia tend to score low in all five categories.
Brain Imaging Reveals a Neural Disconnect
Evidence from both behavioral experiments and brain imaging supports the idea that this condition stems from weak communication between brain networks. People with musical anhedonia can recognize and process melodies without difficulty, showing that the auditory system itself is functioning normally — they simply do not feel pleasure from the experience. Brain scans using fMRI reveal a similar pattern. When listening to music, these individuals show reduced activity in the reward circuit — the part of the brain that processes rewards including food, sex, and art — while responding normally to other rewarding events such as winning money. This indicates that the reward system is intact but not effectively linked to music processing.
“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,” says Marco-Pallarés.
Why Brain Connections Matter for Pleasure
“If the reward circuit is not working well, you get less pleasure from all kinds of rewards,” says author and neuroscientist Ernest Mas-Herrero of the University of Barcelona. “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.”
Genetics, Environment, and Individual Differences
Researchers still do not know exactly why some people develop musical anhedonia, but both genetic makeup and life experiences appear to contribute. A recent study involving twins found that genetics may account for up to 54% of the differences in how much people enjoy music.
Even among people without the condition, sensitivity to rewards varies widely. Despite this, most research on the brain’s reward system has treated pleasure as something that is either present or absent, rather than something that exists along a spectrum. Growing evidence suggests that this assumption is incorrect.
Broader Implications Beyond Music
“We propose that using our methodology to study other reward types could yield the discovery of other specific anhedonias,” says Marco-Pallarés. “It’s possible, for instance, that people with specific food anhedonia may have some deficit in the connectivity between brain regions involved in food processing and the reward circuitry.”
The team is now working with geneticists to pinpoint genes that may contribute to musical anhedonia. They also plan to explore whether the condition remains stable over time or can change throughout a person’s life — and whether musical anhedonia or similar conditions might eventually be reversed.
This research was supported by funding from the European Regional Development Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Government of Catalonia, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Fondation pour l’Audition, Paris.
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