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

Abstract

The pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM) elicits activity in motor and reward areas of the brain and is thought to be driven by predictive processes. Dopamine within motor and limbic cortico-striatal networks is implicated in the predictive processes underlying beat-based timing and music-induced pleasure, respectively. This suggests a central role of cortico-striatal dopamine in in PLUMM. This study tested this hypothesis by comparing PLUMM in Parkinson's disease patients, healthy age-matched, and young controls. Participants listened to musical sequences with varying rhythmic and harmonic complexity (low, medium, 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 relation between rhythmic complexity and ratings, with a preference for medium complexity rhythms, while age-matched controls showed a similar, but weaker, inverted U-shaped response. Conversely, PD patients 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. Together, these results support the role of dopamine within cortico-striatal networks 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

“…Group synchrony in music is more likely a manifestation of adaptations related to bonding and cooperation that produce effects in numerous behavioral domains—after all, we synchronize in many activities, and not always rhythmically 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 .…”

Predictive coding in musical anhedonia: A study of groove

“…Furthermore the present stimuli added reverberation in their reconstructions of the expert drum patterns, which increased acoustic liveness of the percept, and thus the perceived ecological validity of the experiment for the listener. While researcher-composed stimuli are effective in establishing the landmark findings that relate the scientifically generalizable concept of syncopation and rhythmic complexity to the pleasurable urge to move, stimuli that are more ecologically valid and that maximize the enjoyment of the listener may be effective at bridging the gap between lab-based research and real-world applications [ 48 ], such as the design and implementation of music-based interventions that tap into pleasure and movement mechanisms for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease [ 3 , 49 ].…”

Understanding Music and Aging through the lens of Bayesian Inference

“…In this regard, dopamine dysregulation in patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) was found to be associated with flatten responses to musical groove (i.e., the pleasurable urge to move to musical rhythms) (Pando-Naude et al, 2023). Specifically, older adults in this study showed less preference and sensitivity to the complexity of musical rhythms, suggesting a reduced ability to register and process the precision of sensory evidence, amidst biases for top-down consolidated prior models and preferences acquired through lifelong musical experiences.…”

“…Another important form of intervention for older adults is motor rehabilitation, which either aims to restore motor deficits as a result of neurodegenerative diseases, or to combat increasing prevalence of falls in this age group. The underlying mechanisms for attaining benefits in the motor domain are suggested to be multifactorial (Thaut, 2003), including but not limited to the activation of the dopaminergic system as a result of movement and pleasurable feelings elicited by music (Ferreri, Mas-Herrero, et al, 2019, albeit a reduced intensity in PD -see Pando-Naude et al, 2023), and endogenous mechanisms that help maintain the effect of entrainment when external pacing cues cease (Rose et al, 2019), and rhythmic entrainment mediated by auditory-motor coupling.…”