Not All People Are Amused With Music, Study Suggests

A study shows that some people are not stimulated by music in any way. Psychologists at the University of Barcelona discovered this when they conducted an investigation that aims to measure the emotions of the participants while listening to music and it turns out that 5 percent of the study subjects did not show any form of emotion at all.

While the participants who were not affected by music enjoy food, sex and other pleasurable things, they just could not find any gratification while listening to music. During the experiment, they did not tap their fingers to the songs they find groovy, broke a tear or got the slightest goosebumps. Generally, it seemed like they did not feel a single beat of the music.

Amusia is a disorder that refers to the inability of an individual to identify common tunes, such that they cannot determine if a song is out of tune or commonly reports that melodic tunes are “banging” sounds. The research team then tested people with amusia to investigate if they can recognise the different emotions in varied types of music. The finding: mere confirmation that the participants were able to hear the music.

Further into the study, the participants were asked to bring in a copy of music they like. According to study senior author Josep Marco-Pallares, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Barcelona, some of them were not able to provide anything -- the first big shock of the investigation. He said that the Spanish university students did not own an MP3 player, CDs or even an account on Spotify or Pandora.

Physiological reactions were also gauged by measuring the participants’ emotional markers, such as heart rate and skin conductance. This was performed whilst exposing the 30 volunteers to the music today’s college kids find pleasurable to hear. According to Marco-Pallares’ statement to Shots, the participants who were stimulated by the music were said to have had chills. Conversely, those who did not find music pleasurable reported that they did not experience chills or any other real feelings whilst listening to the music.

Initially, the scientists thought that the findings were yielded due to the individual insensitive nature of the participants; however, they conducted another series of tests that involved monetary rewards. The “anhedonic” group was said to exhibit varied reactions, such as faster heart rates and expected skin responses. "This suggests that they don't have a global impairment of the reward system," Marco-Pallares says. "This is specific to music."

Marco-Pallares hopes to take his study one notch higher by investigating the precise reason why such condition exists. His experiment, which was published in Cell Biology, is going to utilise Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to identify if the participants who did not react to music have a different brain response.

To contact the writer, email rinadoctor00@gmail.com