Psyche Loui
Neuroscientist of music and the brain who looked at the wiring behind musical reward and found it varies.
Who they are
Loui and colleagues compared white matter connectivity in a case of severe musical anhedonia against a large control sample showing the normal range of reward sensitivity to music.
The comparison was designed to test an evolutionary claim about music as affective communication, and its findings are useful well outside that argument.
Key papers
Loui, P., Patterson, S., Sachs, M. E., Leung, Y., Zeng, T., & Przysinda, E. (2017). White matter correlates of musical anhedonia: implications for evolution of music. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1664.
Key ideas
Structural connectivity within the reward system predicted individual differences in musical reward across a large population, which had not been shown before.
Patterns of connectivity between auditory and reward systems were atypical in the extreme case of specific musical anhedonia.
Both findings are correlational and the second rests on a single case, which any use of them should say.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01664