Rare neurological condition may explain why some don’t enjoy music

A vinyl record is seen at United Record Pressing, July 11, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)

We’ve all been there. You try sharing a beloved album, artist or niche musical genre with a friend, but for whatever reason, it just doesn’t land.

Maybe it’s a little too mainstream for their tastes, or not mainstream enough. Maybe they’re on the cutting edge of new releases, but have a bit of a tin ear for the classics. Maybe, just maybe, your choice of all-time favourite song is more about what it means to you than its objective quality.

But have you ever encountered someone who doesn’t like songs at all? Someone with no need for a record collection, concert tickets or streaming service, and for whom humanity’s musical canon is all just so much noise?

Though rare, a team of researchers at McGill University and the University of Barcelona says the inability to enjoy music is a distinct neurological phenomenon, and determining how it happens could be key to better understanding how parts of the brain interact.

Carrying a tune?

The term “specific musical anhedonia” (SAR) describes the “impaired ability to derive pleasure from music,” despite both the ability to hear and to find joy in other experiences

Genetics may be involved, but researchers say that environmental factors could also be at play. SAR has sometimes been observed following a brain injury, but the condition has also appeared in patients with no prior neurological issues.

It’s been estimated that between three and five per cent of the population could be impacted.

Researchers used the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) to gather data on the phenomenon, probing respondents with questions about music’s capacity to evoke emotion, regulate mood, foster social connections, compel dance or movement and inspire the search for new sounds and styles.

Combining that survey data with brain imaging taken while listening to music, researchers say that SAR manifests as low activity in the connections between the brain’s pleasure centres and the areas responsible for processing sound, rather than those pleasure centres just failing to operate on their own.

“If the reward circuit is not working well, you get less pleasure from all kinds of rewards,” said study co-author Ernest Mas-Herrero, in a release. “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.”

In a 2016 study, SAR patients showed typical neurological responses to a different source of joy, winning at a game of chance, just not with music. This disconnect, the researchers argue, suggests that different kinds of pleasure can rely on their own pathways through the brain, with varying effectiveness.

The University of Barcelona’s Josep Marco-Pallarés says that understanding the pathways that respond -- or don’t respond -- to musical stimuli could be a stepping stone to other pleasure-related disorders, from general anhedonia (the inability to feel joy), to addiction and eating disorders.

“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,” he said in a release.

“Using our methodology to study other reward types could yield the discovery of other specific anhedonias.”