Hating Music? You May Have Poor Brain Connectivity, Study Suggests

There are many people in the world who extremely dislike music. While liking and disliking music previously believed to be a matter of personal choice, a recently conducted study has raised questions over this belief. The latest research, mutually conducted by the researchers of the University of Barcelona in Spain and the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and Hospital of McGill University in Canada stated that the individuals who hate music have poor brain connectivity.

As highlighted in the study, People who do not find music boring and annoying may have reduced connectivity between two provinces of the brain, which are connected to sound processing and reward. Scientists have named the health condition as ‘Specific musical anhedonia’, which is currently found in three to five percent of the entire global population. The belief that liking music is subjective to individual preference now seems to be dominated by the less-known mess in the brain.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that, the individuals who found music boring ad annoying and lacked joy from it are suffering from a health condition called specific musical anhedonia which the condensed operational connectivity between cortical brain parts, which are responsible for meting out sound and the sub-cortical regions, which are related to reward.

It also will be effective for the researchers to understand the variability in the functional manner of the reward system as well as can enhance some new developmental therapies for the healing of reward-related health conditions like depression, indifference, and addiction,” stated Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University, Quebec.

For conducting the study, the research team of McGill University in Quebec, Canada, involved 45 healthy participants who asked to hear the musical excerpts inside an fMRI machine and giving the satisfaction ratings instantly. In order to control the intellectual response to other reward types, the researchers also asked the participants to take part in a monetary gambling game in which they could prevail or lose real cash.

This discovery is expected to pave the path for the comprehensive exploration of the neural objects and substances underlying other province-specific anhedonias. It can lead researchers towards an evolutionary perspective about the intellectual activity and help them to understand how music obtained reward value.