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Neuroscientists find people who don't enjoy music, study their brain activity.
“I was talking with my colleagues at a conference 10 years ago and I just casually said that everyone loves music,” recalls Josep Marco Pallarés, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona. But it was a statement he started to question almost immediately, given there were clinical cases in psychiatry where patients reported deriving absolutely no pleasure from listening to any kind of tunes.
So, Pallarés and his team spent the past 10 years researching the neural mechanisms behind a condition they called specific musical anhedonia: the inability to enjoy music.
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Kinda reminds me how my family was shocked when I said that "beautiful" old buildings and churches did not move me, at all. Even "nice" nature views don't give me much pleasure (even though I enjoy very much the physical aspect of hiking).
It's such a given that everyone is supposed to enjoy the same things that it becomes weird when people realize we don't.
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I wonder if it's only music they don't enjoy, or if it extends to other art forms like dance or poetry. It really makes you think about how specifically wired our brain's reward system is.
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This disconnection, Pallarés thinks, may involve a neural mechanism similar to that involved in many other conditions that make people unable to enjoy things like food, sex, or social interactions. But beyond that, we don’t know a lot.
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