This new study looks at people who just don’t like music
You’d think that everyone loves music. Alas, no. There’s a condition known as “special musical anhedonia,” which means an inability to find joy and pleasure in any kind of music. They’re healthy, have normal hearing, and enjoy many things in life. Just not music.
The discovery of the condition is quite recent; researchers only stumbled upon it about ten years ago. The cause is a disconnect between the brain’s auditory network and the parts of the brain that understand rewards, like the taste of great pizza, a pleasant smell, or a funny TV show. That part is connected to the secretion of dopamine, the body’s feel-good hormone. Music just isn’t a stimulus that works for them.
A new paper published August 7 in the Cell Press Journal: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the same researchers who discovered the condition, describe what’s going on inside the skulls of these folks.
I quote:
“In specific musical anhedonia, a disconnection between the auditory and reward network when listening to music has been observed, providing a neural basis for the condition. More generally, disruption of connectivity strength between sensory or modality-specific brain areas and the reward network may produce domain-specific individual differences.”
Further study could reveal a better understanding of how different people are able to experience pleasure and joy. The next round of research could extend into things like addiction and eating disorders, both of which are their own specific anhedonias. There’s also a possibility that we may learn more about a genetic cause for these conditions.
(Via Rupinder)
