Ernest Mas-Herrero
Cognitive neuroscientist who documented people with normal hearing, normal music perception and no musical pleasure at all.
Who they are
Mas-Herrero's 2014 paper established specific musical anhedonia as a real and separable condition, dissociating musical reward from monetary reward in the same people.
He is also a co-author of the 2019 pharmacological study, which puts his name on both the causal evidence for musical reward and the clearest constraint on how far it generalises.
Key papers
Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Marco-Pallarés, J. (2014). Dissociation between musical and monetary reward responses in specific musical anhedonia. Current Biology, 24(6), 699-704.
Ferreri, L., Mas-Herrero, E., et al. (2019). PNAS.
Key ideas
Musical reward and monetary reward dissociate: some people respond normally to money and not at all to music.
The condition is specific rather than a general blunting of reward, which is what makes it informative about the route rather than about the reward system.
This publication cites the 2014 paper for the finding stated in its title and has not obtained the abstract, which its article says on the page.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.068