When Music Doesn’t Spark Joy: The Mystery of Musical Anhedonia

A Surprising Claim at a Conference

More than a decade ago, neuroscientist Josep Marco Pallarés, from the University of Barcelona, made what he thought was a simple and safe remark at a conference: “Everyone loves music.” It felt obvious, almost like saying everyone enjoys a sunny day at the beach or the smell of freshly baked bread. But almost immediately after saying it, the idea began to bother him. Was it really true? Could there be people who genuinely felt nothing when they heard music, not even the faintest emotional ripple?

As it turns out, yes. Psychiatry had already documented a few clinical cases of patients reporting that music, no matter the genre or volume, did absolutely nothing for them. They didn’t dislike it, but they didn’t like it either. For them, songs were just soundsstructured noise with no emotional weight. That strange condition is now called specific musical anhedonia, and Pallarés and his colleagues have spent the last ten years digging into its neural roots.

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How Pleasure Normally Works in the Brain

In most people, pleasure is a collaboration between two systems in the brain. First, you have perception: the circuits that let you actually hear the melody, taste the chocolate, or feel the silk fabric. Then, working in tandem, there’s the reward circuitthe one that releases dopamine and makes the experience feel satisfying.

When either of these systems fails, pleasure disappears. If the auditory system malfunctions, music won’t register properly if the reward system is broken, nothingmusic, food, moneywill feel good. That’s the standard view.

But Pallarés suspected there was more nuance. Because here’s the twist: some people with musical anhedonia enjoy plenty of other things. They’ll grin at winning a few euros in a lottery, savor a good meal, and laugh at jokes with friends. It’s only music that leaves them cold.

Designing a Way to Measure It

To investigate, Pallarés and his team built the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, a sort of personality test about music. It covered everything from whether a person uses music to regulate their mood (say, blasting upbeat songs when they feel down) to how much they physically respondtapping a foot, swaying, or dancing.

After screening hundreds of people, the researchers found 15 who scored extremely lowpractically immune to music’s charms. For comparison, they selected 15 music fanatics who scored high, and another 15 who landed somewhere in the middle.

Then came the real test: putting all 45 participants in an fMRI scanner and seeing how their brains reacted to two thingsmusic and gambling.

Music vs. Money in the Brain

The experiment was almost cheeky in its simplicity. Participants listened to pleasant music while in the scanner. Later, they gambled by picking one of two options, with a chance to win a small payout.

The results were striking. For the anhedonic group, winning money reliably lit up their brain’s reward circuits. But when the same people listened to music, nothing happened in those circuits. Zero fireworks. By contrast, the music lovers had the opposite pattern: songs sent their reward circuits buzzing even more strongly than monetary wins. The “middle” group showed equal activation for both.

So the issue wasn’t that the anhedonic group couldn’t hear musictheir auditory circuits were fully functional. Nor was their reward system broken, because it lit up just fine when money was involved. Instead, the problem seemed to lie in the connection between the two: the auditory and reward systems simply weren’t talking to each other. The signal got lost in transit.

A Faulty Connection, Not a Broken System

This subtle disconnection echoes other conditions where people struggle to feel pleasure. Depression, for instance, can blunt the brain’s reward responses, while some people lose their taste for specific joys like food or sex. But what makes musical anhedonia fascinating is its surgical precisionit affects only music, leaving other pleasures untouched.

Why that is remains unclear. Is it just how some brains are wired from birth, or can life experiences weaken that bridge between perception and reward?

Nature, Nurture, or Something in Between?

The big unanswered question is whether this trait is fixed or flexible. Could therapy, training, or even medication “rewire” the connection and allow music to finally register as pleasurable? Or are some people destined to live in a world where songs never quite reach them emotionally?

Pallarés’s team has begun tackling the genetics angle. Preliminary work suggests that about half of our sensitivity to music might be inherited. That’s a big number, but it also means culture and environment likely play the other half. After all, exposure to music varies wildly: a child raised in a house filled with jazz or classical might develop stronger connections than one who never hears more than background jingles.

What This Could Mean Beyond Music

Understanding this condition could have ripple effects. If researchers can map out how specific disconnections between perception and reward arise, they might uncover similar patterns in other conditionslike why some people can’t enjoy social interaction or why food loses its appeal in certain disorders. And if they can identify the mechanism, maybe they can find ways to restore it.

That said, there’s also a philosophical side to this. Maybe not everyone needs to love music. Western culture often treats musical enjoyment as universalalmost a requirement for being human. But perhaps there’s more diversity in how we process pleasure than we assume. Someone unmoved by music might find deeper joy in painting, in numbers, or in cooking.

Closing Thoughts

The story of musical anhedonia challenges our assumptions about universality. Music feels so fundamental that we tend to believe it must stir something in everyone. Yet for a small group of people, it’s just… sound. Nothing more.

And while the scientists work to untangle whether the condition is genetic, cultural, or a bit of both, maybe the broader lesson is about humility. Our brains are astonishingly varied. What moves one person to tears might leave another utterly untouched.

Open Your Mind !!!

Source: ARS