An inability to enjoy music?

Last week a number of papers appeared on musicality, music perception, and pleasure reactions while listening to music. Listeners that lack the latter are described in a paper by the group of Robert Zatorre and named music anhedonists. In a systematic study published online in Current Biology, the authors selected three groups of listeners from a large student population in Barcelona and ended up (using the Barcelona Musical reward Questionnaire) with three groups: a hyperhedonic (H-HDN), an average (HDN), and an anhedonic (ANH) group that has a self-reported low sensitivity to music (Mas-Herrero et al., 2014).

What the percentage of potential ANH listeners was in the student population is not reported, but it must be at least a few percent. So we're talking about quite a small group. The ANH group apparently can perceive (induced) emotions from music but has, as compared to the other two groups, considerably low (or no) pleasure responses to music.

While earlier studies showed that music can tap in into, or has a large overlap with the reward system that is also active for food and sex (orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum, amygdala, insula, and thalamus; see Sescousse et al., 2013), there might be, according to the authors, individual differences in access to the reward system. However, the nature of these differences is unclear.

In addition, this week a study was published on the musicality of non-musicians contributing to the idea that a talent for music is more wide-spread than we might generally think (Müllensiefen et al., 2014). Or to say it in other words: ‘It doesn’t devalue great poets, writers, and orators to say that every human is a user of language, nor does it devalue great musicians to acknowledge that all humans are inherently musical.’ (Erin Hannon on Facebook, 2008).

More on these studies in NRC, Volkskrant and Wetenschap24 [Dutch].

Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Marco-Pallarés, J. (2014). Dissociation between Musical and Monetary Reward Responses in Specific Musical Anhedonia. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.068

Müllensiefen, D., Gingras, B., Musil, J., & Stewart, L. (2014). The Musicality of Non-Musicians: An Index for Assessing Musical Sophistication in the General Population. PLoS ONE, 9 (2) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0089642

Sescousse, G., Caldú, X., Segura, B., & Dreher, J. (2013). Processing of primary and secondary rewards: A quantitative meta-analysis and review of human functional neuroimaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37 (4), 681-696 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2013.02.002

Wel zin in seks en eten, maar niet in muziek? [Dutch]

Vandaag in NRC Handelsblad.

Zie ook Wetenschap24.
Zie ook Volkskrant.

Was Steven Pinker right after all? [Part 2]

At the end of the 1990s, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker infamously characterized music as “auditory cheesecake”: a delightful dessert but, from an evolutionary perspective, no more than a by-product of language. But Pinker was probably right when he wrote: “I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of...our mental faculties.” Or, to express his idea less graphically: music affects our brains at specific places, thereby stimulating the production of unique substances that have a pleasurable effect on our mood. However, rather than a by-product of evolution, music or more precisely musicality is likely to be a characteristic that survived natural selection in order to stimulate and develop our mental faculties (cf. Honing, 2011).

Pinker’s idea may actually be a very fruitful hypothesis whose significance has wrongfully gone unacknowledged because of all the criticism it elicited. After all, the purely evolutionary explanations for the origins of music largely overlook the experience of music we all share: the pleasure we derive from it, not only from the acrobatics of making it but also from the act of listening to it.

Last week Science published a study (a follow-up of Salimpoor et al., 2011) in which Canadian researchers were able to show precisely that: Music can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. They were able to show that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system, most notably the nucleus accumbens. And, more importantly, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself.

Salimpoor, V., van den Bosch, I., Kovacevic, N., McIntosh, A., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2013). Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value Science, 340 (6129), 216-219 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231059

Salimpoor, V., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn.2726

Honing, H. (2011) Musical Cognition. A Science of Listening. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.