"Music doesn't lie. If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music," said Jimi Hendrix. However, some might not agree with the late legendary guitarist’s thought. A latest study explains why some people do not like music.
Researchers in this small study refer to this newly described condition as "musical anhedonia" that in simpler words translates to the specific inability to experience pleasure from music.
"The identification of these individuals could be very important to understanding the neural basis of music-that is, to understand how a set of notes (is) translated into emotions," says Josep Marco-Pallarés of the University of Barcelona, in a press release.
For the study, the researchers examined three groups of ten people. Each group had participants with high, average and low pleasure ratings. The researchers chose the participants on their similar overall sensitivity and their ability to perceive music.
The three groups were assigned two different experiments. In the first one the participants had to rate the degree of pleasure while listening to pleasant music. The second assignment was monetary incentive delay task in which participants had to respond quickly in order to win or avoid losing real money. Both the tasks were linked to activate the reward center in the brain that involves dopamine, a neurotransmitter that regulates emotional responses and sees rewards, the researchers explained.
The researchers found that people who as such were "healthy and happy" did not enjoy music and "showed no autonomic responses to its sound, despite normal musical perception capacities." But, the same participants in the monetary task responded well. This showed that the lack of sensitivity to music was unique, and not a defect involving the entire reward region of the brain.
"The idea that people can be sensitive to one type of reward and not another suggests that there might be different ways to access the reward system and that, for each person, some ways might be more effective than others," Marco-Pallarés said.
The researchers said that the results were important as they might lead to new understandings of the reward system with implications for pathologies that include addiction and affective disorders.
A recent study showed that sad music helps improve moods of people.
The current study was published in 'Current Biology.' If you want to know your music reward spectrum answer the questions here.
