Music listening and schizophrenia substantially involve emotion, subjective experience, motivation, and cognition in a complex manner. Despite these similarities, existing research appears to offer limited synthesis of their shared neuroscientific foundations. Accordingly, this narrative review integrates findings on the neural mechanisms underlying music listening and schizophrenia, based on analyses of peer-reviewed journal articles retrieved from PubMed, PsycINFO, and Nature Research databases, to specifically address their neurobiological parallels. In conclusion, the ventral tegmental area (VTA), nucleus accumbens (NAc), inferior frontal gyrus, motor areas, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and cingulate cortex, encompassing dopaminergic reward circuitry, have been found to be the shared neural substrates implicated in both domains. Since previous intervention studies have widely discussed its clinical benefits across various disorders, music listening as an easily accessible and effective medium may potentially remain promising; nonetheless, technological and empirical limitations necessitate further investigation alongside methodological refinement, with particular emphasis on enhancing the consistency of findings.

Schizophrenia, Music listening, Neuroscience, Musical reward, Neuroimaging, Symptomatology, Dopamine hypothesis