A minority of people report feeling no enjoyment from music despite normal hearing and intact responses to other rewards—a trait known as specific musical anhedonia. Researchers say evidence from brain-imaging and behavioral studies points to weaker communication between auditory regions and the brain’s reward circuitry as a key mechanism, a finding that could help clarify how pleasure is generated and why it can be selectively disrupted.
Researchers have long noted that some otherwise healthy people report little to no pleasure from music even though they can hear normally and still enjoy other rewards. This pattern—often referred to as specific musical anhedonia—was documented in research showing that some participants rated music as less pleasurable and lacked typical physiological reactions to enjoyable music, while still responding normally to monetary rewards.
A recent review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences summarizes evidence that the phenomenon is best explained not by a broadly impaired reward system, but by reduced interaction between auditory-processing networks and reward-related regions such as the ventral striatum (including the nucleus accumbens). In prior functional MRI work, people identified as having specific musical anhedonia showed preserved musical perception but reduced reward-related responses during music listening, alongside weaker functional connectivity between auditory cortex and reward circuitry.
To quantify differences in how people experience music as rewarding, researchers have also used the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), a 20-item measure that breaks music-related reward into five facets: Musical Seeking, Emotion Evocation, Mood Regulation, Social Reward, and Sensory-Motor responses. In studies describing the tool, these dimensions capture how strongly a person seeks out music, feels emotion from it, uses it to manage mood, experiences social bonding through it, and feels movement-related or bodily engagement.
The causes of these individual differences are not fully established. However, twin research in a large Swedish sample has reported that genetic factors account for up to about 54% of the variability in music reward sensitivity, suggesting a substantial heritable component alongside environmental influences and life experiences.
Researchers say the broader implication is that pleasure is not a single on–off function of the reward system. Instead, enjoyment may depend on how reward circuitry interacts with brain networks that process specific types of stimuli—raising the possibility that similarly selective “specific anhedonias” could exist for other domains. The review argues that mapping these stimulus-specific pathways may be relevant to understanding psychiatric conditions in which reward processing is altered, including depression and addiction, although it emphasizes that translating these insights into treatments will require further study.
