Dopamine dysregulation in Parkinson's disease flattens the pleasurable urge to move to musical rhythms

Abstract

The pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM) activates motor and reward areas of the brain and is thought to be driven by predictive processes. Dopamine in motor and limbic networks is implicated in beat‐based timing and music‐induced pleasure, suggesting a central role of basal ganglia (BG) dopaminergic systems in PLUMM. This study tested this hypothesis by comparing PLUMM in participants with Parkinson's disease (PD), age‐matched controls, and young controls. Participants listened to musical sequences with varying rhythmic and harmonic complexity (low, medium and high), and rated their experienced pleasure and urge to move to the rhythm. In line with previous results, healthy younger participants showed an inverted U‐shaped relationship between rhythmic complexity and ratings, with preference for medium complexity rhythms, while age‐matched controls showed a similar, but weaker, inverted U‐shaped response. Conversely, PD showed a significantly flattened response for both the urge to move and pleasure. Crucially, this flattened response could not be attributed to differences in rhythm discrimination and did not reflect an overall decrease in ratings. For harmonic complexity, PD showed a negative linear pattern for both the urge to move and pleasure while healthy age‐matched controls showed the same pattern for pleasure and an inverted U for the urge to move. This contrasts with the pattern observed in young healthy controls in previous studies, suggesting that both healthy aging and PD also influence affective responses to harmonic complexity. Together, these results support the role of dopamine within cortico‐striatal circuits in the predictive processes that form the link between the perceptual processing of rhythmic patterns and the affective and motor responses to rhythmic music.

Pace setting as an adaptive precursor of rhythmic musicality

“…122 Many of music's pleasurable effects do not require participation in collective behavior to be experienced. 123,124 Furthermore, the pleasurable effects of musical synchrony 125 can also be produced from asynchronous activities, 126 and may be occasioned by group membership itself rather than specific activities the group might engage in. 127 The model proposed here, therefore, has the benefit of not requiring the positing of group-level functions that require controversial cultural and/or genetic group selection and other special-case explanations.…”

The perceived catchiness of music affects the experience of groove

“…Whether tapping along to a rock song playing on the radio, swaying your body with the beat of a soothing ballad, or just letting go on a dancefloor–feeling the urge to move to music is a familiar sensation to many people. This “pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music” [ 1 ] or pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM [ 2 , 3 ]) constitutes a central aspect of what music psychologists call groove.…”