When your favorite song is blasting through the speakers, your pulse ticks up, and the hair on your skin starts tingling. But people like Allison Sheridan hear the same chorus and feel… nothing. And that’s for any kind of music.
Despite coming from a musical family and growing up around a shelf of vinyl, “music sits in an odd spot halfway between boring and distracting.” She adds, “The only suffering is being mocked by other people, because they don’t understand it. Everybody loves music, right?”
A new review argues that this woman’s shrug isn’t about bad ears or bad taste. It’s about a broken handoff in the brain — sound enters the auditory system, but the message fails to cross into the part of the brain that offers a reward. The result is “specific musical anhedonia,” a selective indifference to music in otherwise healthy people.
The Odd Case of Pleasureless Music
Previous studies have shown that people who don’t enjoy music show normal hearing. They also respond normally to other pleasure-triggering stimuli. Win money in a game and the brain’s reward hub — the nucleus accumbens — lights up. Listen to a beloved song and, in these same people, it barely flickers. Their heart rate and skin conductance stay flat. Roughly 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population has an apathy toward music.
The new paper, published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, makes the case that the culprit lies somewhere in brain connectivity. Pleasure from music depends on how strongly auditory regions, especially the right superior temporal gyrus, talk to the accumbens. In musical anhedonia, that line is broken. The engine of reward works; the bridge to it does not.
There’s no direct highway between those structures. Highly processed sound travels through valuation hubs — the orbitofrontal cortex and the insula — before reaching the accumbens. Differences in the integrity of these pathways track how rewarding people find music. Think of the orbitofrontal cortex as a switchboard that routes meaning-rich sound toward pleasure.
The framework also fits with what we know about reward chemistry. Dopamine and opioids help translate tension and release into feeling, especially in music, where expectation and surprise unfold second by second.
Studying Anhedonia
To find musical anhedonia in the first place, the team built the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), which measures five ways music can be rewarding:
- Emotion evocation (the ability of music to evoke intense emotions)
- Mood regulation (its capacity to manage emotional states)
- Social reward (the benefits due to social connections fostered by music)
- Sensorimotor engagement (tapping, dancing, singing)
- Music seeking (the drive to find more pleasurable music)
People with musical anhedonia tend to score low across all five. The questionnaire has been validated across languages, revealing a spectrum of responses to music, from total indifference or apathy to hyper-hedonics (those who find great pleasure in music and couldn’t imagine life without it).
Genetics seems to matter. A recent twin study suggests inherited factors explain up to 54% of the variability in how much people enjoy music, most of it independent of basic pitch perception and general reward sensitivity.
Not every facet of music goes dark in anhedonia. Several studies find that the urge to move — the simple pleasure of swaying or tapping — can remain intact, hinting that rhythm-heavy pathways are more resilient than those that carry pitch and harmony.
“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 neuroscientist Josep Marco-Pallarés of the University of Barcelona.
Co-author Ernest Mas-Herrero, also of the University of Barcelona, adds: “If the reward circuit is not working well, you get less pleasure from all kinds of rewards. 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.”
A Broken Bridge
The authors argue that the same logic could help explain why pleasure varies across domains. “A similar mechanism could underlie individual differences in responses to other rewarding stimuli,” Marco-Pallarés says. “Investigating these circuits could pave the way for new research on individual differences and reward-related disorders such as anhedonia, addiction, or eating disorders.”
In brain terms: each sense takes a different route into a shared reward hub, often passing through the orbitofrontal cortex and the insula. Connectivity along those routes may shape who gets excited about dessert, touch, or a painting — and who doesn’t.
The paper lays out testable predictions. If music’s pleasure depends on the strength of that auditory-to-reward bridge, then boosting the bridge should boost the feeling. Early neuromodulation studies are consistent with that idea. When researchers nudge the reward circuit with noninvasive stimulation, reported pleasure from music can rise.
It also sketches open questions. Is musical anhedonia fixed, or can training rebuild the link? The authors call for genome-wide studies and for longitudinal work to learn whether the trait changes over time.
They even float an intriguing scenario: might some people with general anhedonia — the inability to experience joy or pleasure — retain an island of joy for one domain? Finding such cases could reveal how domain-specific bridges survive broader outages.
And for the hyper-hedonics — those who “say life would be unimaginable without music” — there’s a neat symmetry. The same bridge that fails for some may be overpaved for others. Either way, the tune only lands if it can cross.
