It is often said that music is a universal language but new research has found that not everyone gets the same pleasure from listening to it.
Scientists have tuned into a condition called specific musical anhedonia, or the specific inability to experience pleasure from music.
Researchers previously found hints about this form of anhedonia after they developed a questionnaire to evaluate individual differences in musical reward.
This found some individuals reported low sensitivity to music but average sensitivity to other kinds of reward.
Multiple explanations are possible for these low music sensitivities as for instance, some people might seem to dislike music because they have trouble perceiving it, a condition called amusia, or it could be that some people simply answered the questions inaccurately.
In the latest study, the research team decided to look more closely at three groups of 10 people, with each group consisting of participants with high pleasure ratings in response to music, average pleasure ratings in response to music, or low sensitivity to musical reward.
Participants in the three groups were chosen based on their comparable overall sensitivity to other types of rewards and their ability to perceive music.
The subjects participated in two different experiments – a music task in which they had to rate the degree of pleasure they were experiencing while listening to pleasant music, and a monetary incentive delay task, in which participants had to respond quickly to a target in order to win or avoid losing real money.
Both tasks have been shown to engage reward-related neural circuits and produce a rush of dopamine.
Meanwhile, the researchers recorded changes of skin conductance response and heart rate as physiological indicators of emotion.
They concluded that some otherwise healthy and happy people do not enjoy music and show no autonomic responses to its sound, despite normal musical perception capacities.
Those people do respond to monetary rewards, which shows that low sensitivity to music is not tied to some global abnormality of the reward network.
The findings might lead to new understandings of the reward system, with implications for pathologies including addiction and affective disorders, the researchers said.
Josep Marco-Pallares, of the University of Barcelona, said: “The identification of these individuals could be very important to understanding the neural basis of music – that is, to understand how a set of notes (is) translated into emotions.
“The idea that people can be sensitive to one type of reward and not to another suggests that there might be different ways to access the reward system and that, for each person, some ways might be more effective than others.”
The findings were published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.