Neuroscientists Explored How the Brain Reacts to Music

Whether it’s Bach’s Cello Suites, Kendrick Lamar lyrically skewering Drake or the avant-garde work made by Merzbow, music is something that a lot of people find eminent pleasure in listening to. “A lot of people” isn’t the same thing as “everyone,” though, and a paper published this month in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences expanded our knowlege of a condition called “musical anhedonia.”

Besides being a great name for an album, musical anhedonia refers to an inability to feel pleasure as a result of listening to music. In a 2017 article for The Atlantic, Divya Abhat reported that between three and five percent of the world’s population experience “an apathy toward music.” This more recent paper ventures into the neuroscience of it all — namely, why certain brains get nothing whatsoever out of music.

In their paper, the scientists who conducted the recent study — which took 10 years to complete — described that their findings included the idea of “a brain model suggesting that reward experiences depend on both the overall functioning of the reward system and specific perceptual–reward network interactions.”

One of the paper’s authors, University of Barcelona neuroscientist Josep Marco Pallarés, discussed the process behind this research to Jacek Krywko in an article for Ars Technica. As Pallarés explained, one of the goals of this research was to better understand why some people experience musical anhedonia, as opposed to a wider-ranging version of the same condition.

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They discovered what Krwwko described as a “disconnection” between the part of the brain that hears music and the part of the brain that expresses pleasure for it.

The scientists’ findings have given them new areas to research in the coming years. Pallarés told Ars Technica that “[w]e want to learn to what extent specific musical anhedonia has genetic basis and to what extent it stems from cultural conditioning.”

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…