Lack of joy from music linked to brain disconnection

Using fMRI data, researchers found that while listening to music, specific musical anhedonics presented a reduction in the activity of the Nucleus Accumbens. Have you ever met someone who just wasn't into music' They may have a condition called specific musical anhedonia, which affects three-to-five per cent of the population. Researchers at the University of Barcelona and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University have discovered that people with this condition showed reduced functional connectivity between cortical regions responsible for processing sound and subcortical regions related to reward. Have you ever met someone who just wasn't into music' They may have a condition called specific musical anhedonia, which affects three-to-five per cent of the population. Researchers at the University of Barcelona and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University have discovered that people with this condition showed reduced functional connectivity between cortical regions responsible for processing sound and subcortical regions related to reward. To understand the origins of specific musical anhedonia, researchers recruited 45 healthy participants who completed a questionnaire measuring their level of sensitivity to music and divided them into three groups of sensitivity based on their responses. The test subjects then listened to music excerpts inside an fMRI machine while providing pleasure ratings in real-time.