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It may seem strange to most, but to some people music doesn’t bring any positive feeling. A new study states that this behavioral feature is the fault of a disconnection between hearing networks and brain reward.
Most studies on the human reward system It has assumed a global sensitivity, which means that a person’s ability to experience pleasure is a unified trait that generally applies to all types of rewarding stimuli.
However, about a decade ago, a team from the University of Barcelona challenged this notion by discovering a condition that he called “Specific Musical Anedonia”.
Researchers studied individuals who did not find music pleasant, but still enjoyed other rewarding stimuli.
In a study last week in Trends in Cognitive Sciencesthe same team managed to describe the mechanism underlying these individual differences in sensitivity to musical reward.
The investigators concluded that anedonia musical is caused by a weak connection between the brain’s hearing network and its reward circuitinstead of any specific dysfunction.
This disconnect impairs the ability of music to activate the necessary reward systems for someone to get pleasure.
“A similar mechanism could be on the basis of individual differences in the responses to other rewarding stimuli,” the study co -author, told Josep Marco-Pallarés.
“Investigating these circuits could make way for further research on individual differences and reward -related disturbances, such as Apedonia, dependence or food disturbances”He added.
In the new study, to identify individuals with specific musical anedonia, the researchers developed a questionnaire called Barcelona’s musical reward questionnaire (BMRQ).
This tool measured five distinct forms of people to relate to music:
- evoke emotions;
- regulate the state of mind;
- Promote social connections;
- Encourage dance or movement;
- And look for novelty through research, collecting or experienced music.
People with this condition tend to obtain low scores in the five dimensions; do not choose favorites easily, rarely feel goose bumps and react less intensely to musicbut, curiously, they usually respond to monetary rewards.
As brain images support this idea of brain disconnection.
For a “normal” listener, neuroimaging showed increased activity in regions such as the accumbens nucleus, part of the brain’s reward machinery when listening to pleasant music.
On the other hand, in People with Musical Anedoniamagnetic resonances showed reduced response to musicbut not to other pleasures.
The reason people develop this condition remains unknown. The study proposes that genetics and the environment play a fundamental role, but does not rule out brain injuries specific ones that produce similar conditions of selective loss of pleasure.
“It is possible, for example, that people with specific food anedonia may have some deficit in connectivity between brain regions involved in food processing and the reward circuit,” concluded Marco-Pallarés.
