The neural system of people who don't like music.
Allison Sheridan doesn't care about music. Songs of love and heartbreak do not bring her to tears, complex classical compositions do not amaze her, peppy beats don't let her dance. For Sheridan, a retired engineer, now a podcaster, who owns 12 vinyl records and has not programmed the radio stations in her car, “the music is in a strange place halfway between boring and distracting.” Despite coming from a huge musical family, Sheridan is part of the approximately 3 to 5 percent of the world's population who is apathetic about music. It is what is referred to as specific musical anhedonia, other than general anhedonia, which is the inability to feel any pleasure and is often associated with depression. In fact, there is nothing inherently wrong with musical anhedonics; their indifference to music is not a source of depression or suffering of any kind.
SheridanThe only suffering is mocked by other people because they don't understand. Everyone loves music, right?
Love music
Out of an earlier research appears that the vast majority of people who enjoy music show an increase in heart rate or skin conduction, with a person's skin temporarily becoming a conductor of electricity in response to something they find stimulating. However, musical anhedonics do not show such physiological change in music. A study , published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has taken those findings a step further by studying neural reactions to music. As part of the study, 45 students from the University of Barcelona (where most authors of the study are based) were asked to complete a questionnaire that helped determine their sensitivity to musical rewards. Based on their answers, they were divided into groups of three people who don't care about music at all, people who have any interest in music, and people who essentially live and breathe music. The researchers then had them listen to music as they measure their brain activity using an fMRI machine.
