Overview

• Published August 7 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the team demonstrated that reduced connectivity between auditory regions and the brain’s reward circuit drives specific musical anhedonia.
• Individuals with the condition score uniformly low on all five dimensions of the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire despite normal auditory perception and intact responses to other rewards.
• fMRI data show markedly diminished activation in reward areas during music listening but normal reward-circuit engagement when processing nonmusical stimuli such as monetary gains.
• Twin analyses estimate that genetic factors account for up to 54 percent of variability in how much individuals enjoy music, prompting collaboration with geneticists to pinpoint causal variants.
• Ongoing research will assess the stability and potential reversibility of musical anhedonia and explore whether similar circuit disconnects underlie other specific anhedonias.