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 Pallares, 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, Pallares 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 joyWhen 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.